


How We All Got There (Was a Mystery)

by pettiot



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Betrayal, Dystopia, Exile, F/M, Gender Themes, Supernatural - Freeform, fantasies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2007-11-02
Updated: 2007-11-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:47:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 25,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22521262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pettiot/pseuds/pettiot
Summary: How a project like Jenova gets off the ground; how a subproject like Omega gets its legs.  (Incomplete)
Relationships: Gast/Ifalna, Lucrecia Crescent/Grimoire Valentine, Lucrecia/Hojo, Lucrecia/Vincent





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Unfinished and unlikely to be finished. But just the same, it brings back fond memories. This was my first pre-planned (not on the fly), structured effort at a novel.

Lucrecia Crescent's apartment was functional, restrained, and empty. 

The subtle contrast of furniture to drapes was not by her intent, but rather a gift of the Shinra designer who had specified a base standard of fitout. Lucrecia, having graduated into adulthood directly from the boarding house of General U, had cultivated a lack of attachment to her surroundings that depended on her lack of ownership: she kept her apartment in its original state. The only evidence of her involvement was in a pile of books, which still lacked a bookshelf six years after she had moved into the apartment, and in her wardrobe, where she had yet to bring herself to discard an item of clothing, even those which she had bought on her scanty scholarship at the age of sixteen and which she would never wear again.

The apartment's kitchen was very clean. The bathroom was a shower, which shared space with a commode and a basin, both of which could fold away. The bathroom was also very clean, and smelled of a heavy floral perfume for which the bottle had been packed. Even in a forced rush, Lucrecia had not forgotten her perfume, though it appeared she had forgotten her toothbrush, the only brightly coloured item in a scheme of neutral shades. 

The living area had one window, which looked directly at the construction site of the new Shinra Administration building, currently no more than a ziggurat of scaffolding on which small cranes crawled skywards. It was currently two hours before dawn, and still dark, so the neon glow of each crane's branding dominated the vista. The building in potentia appeared crafted purely of light and Shinra's logo. Lucrecia had seen the floor plans: it was a conspiratorial quirk of fate that her office in the new building would be located exactly level with her apartment. The consultant who repaired her computer once a fortnight had suggested she implement a walkway between the two buildings, a skybridge between work and home, to spare herself the sixty five staircases she would otherwise have to descend and climb daily. At the time, Lucrecia had responded, unamused, that she was certain there would be a lift. Late at night, she would watch the construction unfold and think about wings.

The apartment had no room for a dining table. A side table proved the final resting place of a letter of some significance, which had been hand-delivered one hour prior, accompanied by a demanding hammering at the apartment door. Lucrecia had been dozing, jolted into motion by the guilt which accompanied the unexpected demand at her door. Very likely the knocking had been loud enough to wake her neighbours; as she left, Lucrecia noted the gleam of light at the edge of every front door on her floor.

The letter contained a summons for her services, from the President. It was wordy, indirect, and confusing. The use of bluecoats to deliver the letter convinced Lucrecia of her compulsory involvement, a valid argument in comparison to the sentiment contained within:

_The question which vexes us still is "why". Above all, we are aware of the public's hunger for real answers which are more than rousing slogans, but which will restore once again to the citizens of Greater Midgar and of the world their imperiled livelihoods and calm the spreading fear for one's life._

_Be assured; your role has been chosen. You will sink into the generous pool of public sentiment. Your acceptance will be met ever and always with my and with Midgar's eternal gratitude._

Lucrecia shook through a lukewarm shower. She packed as instructed. She left, flanked by Turks with guns, her suitcase's wheels caught at the threshold. She could not eradicate her sense of outrage. They had invaded her apartment simply with their presence, politeness notwithstanding, two men too large for her contained neutrality. She could not condone her own fear: it had been years, but the forceful knocking, the lateness of the hour, the uncertainty of the letter, brought back worries scarcely subdued. She did not think she would see the apartment again; already, it was no longer hers.

Lucrecia thought she was being called to account.

Her apartment had no lift. One of the Turks offered to carry her suitcase. Lucrecia saw no reason to refuse.

She did not notice the fifteen flights of descent, as an unwarranted fear gave her wings.


	2. Chapter 2

Once at Central's rust-coloured gates, Lucrecia's escort did not follow her. 

Lucrecia stepped between columns into a moment between events; the train in dock was full, preparing to pull away, the station cleared but for one woman and two men, who appeared unified with shock. They stood close, with similar stances, and they all stared at nothing. A third man, a bluecoat, kept to one side and did not speak. She was not alone in her turmoil; it was apparent that she should join the four who waited. 

Lucrecia moved without alarm or urgency. 

As the train currently in dock moved away, a few civilians on board risked glancing through the train's portholes. Lucrecia realised that she, and her siblings in shock, were the focus of those stares. She was thankful the whole train was not gawking. That a bluecoat stood at the station was reason enough to keep the majority of gazes downcast.

Had Lucrecia not been preoccupied by her circumstances, she would have noted her discomfort. The Turks had kept her walking quickly, their car had been unairconditioned, and subplate Midgar dripped with its unexceptional humidity. Lucrecia wore an old coat of a classic cut that passed for new from a distance; her dependence on her laboratory's climate control had left her little need for layering. The crossed tracks through Central spared the station the rust-coloured condensation that recycled elsewhere, though the heat was as unrelenting as the trains, hot air forced likewise into motion. The hub on which both sub and upplate Midgar so depended, the station even had a sky, a glass dome that filtered dawn in shades of amber and gold. The light painted concrete and steel in an antiqued monochrome.

Lucrecia took refuge in the sound of the train's immediate motion, a preventative for the conversation yet to occur. She rolled her shoulders against her coat, as her neck felt unusually bowed by the pressure of a too-large collar; long disuse seemed to have shrunken the seams unevenly.

On her right breast pocket, Lucrecia wore a namebadge which advertised her as one Lucrecia Crescent, Research Team. It was not the namebadge that she wore to work, which announced her as Lucrecia Crescent, Biotech, but otherwise identical, a Shinra logo beneath her name, laminated with edges sharp enough to cut the unwary handler. As it was Lucrecia's habit to look at the labels before the person, she read the similar namebadges her companions wore. Shinra etiquette required no contact, vocalisation, or shaking of hands: Lucrecia introduced herself by default to Professor Gast Faremis, Doctor Hojo, Ifalna, and V. Valentine.

The last name preoccupied Lucrecia to the extent of ignoring a climate which would otherwise have generated her complaint. 

The presentation of Lucrecia's namebadge had been one aspect in the confusion of this morning that returned to Lucrecia her equilibrium, her name and designation a familiar aspect in her current circumstance. Despite the bluecoats, the hour, her guilt, she was not being called to account for mishaps from long ago; this was something else entirely, and without knowledge Lucrecia could only surrender to what events demanded of her. On seeing V. Valentine, she felt herself again thrown into a turmoil she knew for futile. She detested her emotion, its futility, and the cause. Who else could he be? V. Valentine wore the mark of his paternity, as obvious as the quality of his blue suit.

Had Lucrecia been the kind of woman to have kept a journal, it could have decided for her how she should have approached this moment. As it was, the script unravelling in the darkness behind her eyes offered her sufficient justification that she could have gone hysterical, had she been the kind of woman to indulge herself. She was not. She merely looked not quite at V. Valentine's shoulders, which were as broad as her memory of his father's, presented to her along with the shape of his back. The cut of both his coat and his hair exposed his nape. His father had dressed in the fashion of his native land, and never appeared so modern, or so bare. 

Staring at his nape, Lucrecia could not shake the sensation that, despite the layers of coat, shirt, and guns beneath, V. Valentine stood before her naked. 

She blushed. She experienced the additional heat as impending claustrophobia. This was odd, as Central was a grand, vaulted space despite the litter of column, brace, and shadow; stranger still for that they were still alone, and not crushed by the press that should have been awaiting the next train. In some detachment, Lucrecia looked over her shoulder. At the station's entrance gates, bluecoats diverted the day's commuters, an event common enough to earn no vocal protest. On other occasions Lucrecia had stood on the outside of that gate peering in. She wondered if some studious sort now struggled, jammed in that knot of human flesh, looking in as Lucrecia looked out.

When Lucrecia turned back, she discovered V. Valentine looking at her. 

For his part, Vincent wondered only if the researcher contemplated something she might have left behind in the morning rush. She seemed flushed, and reluctant to meet his eyes, but Vincent found no guilt in this. He was a Turk; he expected no other reaction from a woman but fear, no reaction from a man but anger motivated by the same. He could not foresee that either reaction would compromise his role on this assignment, and so he did nothing to allieviate the researcher's flush, uncertainty, or concerns. 

Trained to the gun, Vincent blinked infrequently. His stare was discomforting even to those who knew him well. Lucrecia knew him not at all.

When no more was left of the last train but for a whistle to tell where it had gone, Lucrecia consoled herself with the realization that neither of them wished to play the role of icebreaker. She looked away.


	3. Chapter 3

The wait was short, but felt interminable for the silence that continued uninterrupted. The space around Lucrecia allowed her to hear the creaking, groaning of Central's structural supports, as though the iron ached at the touch of the sun, bolts restricted by the filigree they pinned into place. As a child Lucrecia had always watched the birds here, living their lives above the lines, but now there were no birds permitted within the station despite the arches that offered so much compromise in place of branches. Since the frequency of monstrous incidents in the wilderness had increased, even to the extent of plaguing Midgar's periphery, it was not safe to allow birds within the city. To this end, the ornamentation itself bristled with further ornament: a corona of thin spikes.

While she waited, Lucrecia learned her companions by more than their namebadges. The Doctor bit his nails, the Professor tapped his toe, and Ifalna toyed with her hair. V. Valentine was economically still, from what Lucrecia could judge, but she avoided looking at him to excess lest he determine her interest unusual. 

The train arrived, and with it the realisation of an unknown future. Lucrecia, quite unlike herself, had been unable to see past her current circumstances. A train arrived, and Lucrecia would board it, travelling to an unknown destination. She had never before left Midgar. She tried to impose a personal logic on her circumstances. Their end destinations would be limited by their mode of transport. Midgar linked to other continents via the Del Sol Channel, from Del Sol, a slow creep across the upcountry to Corel or down into Gongaga's jungles; considering the coats they had all been requested to wear, Lucrecia did not think Gongaga likely. But what was in the mountains? 

Apart from its engine and an accommodation carriage, the train also pulled a large refrigerated unit. Fueled by mako, the train itself operated without emission, yet white-cold steam leaked from the seams on that rear trailer, an ominous fog that did nothing to comfort Lucrecia and everything to remind her of the stinking steam trains of her childhood, as though this train wanted to transport her nowhere but back into that past.

She said, sharply: 'I hope that giant fridge isn't the reason why we were told to pack warm clothes. I'm not working in those conditions.' 

Her utterance arrived loudly. In her contemplation, she had forgotten the unspoken compact to maintain the silence. The others turned from their regard of the approaching train and their own uncertain futures to consider her instead, as though anticipating her next words would offer an alternative to their situation, or at least an apology for her objection. 

Only Ifalna seemed taken by the urge to collude: she snickered, in sympathy.

'Not quite,' said V. Valentine, rendered Shinra's mouthpiece by the blue coat he wore, 'but fundamentally yes, as you'll see when we reach our destination. We have some distance to go.' 

Having already exchanged glances with all previous members of the party, noting Lucrecia's flush, Gast's irritation, Hojo's challenge and Ifalna's smile, Vincent had no reason to address them directly, so he spoke still facing the train. Hojo snorted, likely thinking the Turk's turned back a simple arrogance. Lucrecia thought V. Valentine simply wished to avoid answering her directly.

Midgar's street vowels were clear on Vincent's tongue. He had worked hard at eradicating his accent. The barest trace of a foreign clip could be heard only by someone who strained to note it.

Hojo's snort proved the precursor to a tirade he had been unwilling to unleash without another to act as icebreaker. 'Brilliantly uninformative answer, Turk, nearly as clear as that invitation and the compulsory RSVP attached, you guys probably practice ripping the meaning out of words for fun. So, if one of us happens to ask how long this party's going to run-'

V. Valentine said, monotone: 'Short parties can be dissatisfying experiences, Doctor.'

'Ah, Mr Valentine, but who can guess from a few friendly words what an all-night party might involve? What's going to happen after dark, when's the special guests coming out, and who the hell thought callgirls were a good idea? No, Valentine, I'd prefer some certainty before I step onto that train. I'm sure even you can understand all of us here operate by proofs; I was hustled here in the company of an unspoken threat, and I'm not going further without an explanation.'

'Here, here,' said Ifalna, with clear continuity of her role as the moral support. 

Gast's feet had been the embodiment of his uncertainty so far; his tapping toe became a definitive forward move, a step that brought him into the centre. 'Everyone, please,' the Professor announced, 'I must apologise! I had no idea you - you all - would be approached so precipitously-'

V. Valentine was unrepentant. 'All in good time, if you please, Professor.'

'Hold on,' Lucrecia said, 'you -- Professor. You know why we're here, and you didn't say a thing this whole time? We've been waiting--!'

Gast shuffled, and hunched, unable to determine how to deflect the tremor of anger underlying Lucrecia's demand; she herself was surprised to hear her uncertainty articulated as a demand. 

'I do apologise, Ms Crescent, I truly do, but I have been asked to keep this confidential until --'

'You will all be briefed in Costa Del Sol,' so said Valentine.

'Of course we will be,' said Hojo, 'once we're on the train and we can't get off, what a perfect time to ask us to stay the night. You're a real gent, you are.'

When the train came to a definite halt, the doors opened. As if spurred by Hojo's last comment, V. Valentine stepped brisk to one side, his left arm behind his back, as though he intended nothing more than to usher them all forward with a gentleman's grace. Raised to class and knowing its uselessness, the gesture provoked Lucrecia to laugh, just once, a-ha.

No forward motion was made on the part of the wholly ignorant.

'You're not being arrested,' Gast said. His frustration, and what could only be called his excitement, seemed greater than his repentence, for the shift of his feet now was not a shuffle but rather a definite click of his heel on the tile; an impatient tap, irregular in intensity. The refrigerated carriage, tiger-striped by the sunlight angled through the station's girders, had begun to sweat; Gast glanced at it often. 'I will guarantee that-- Mr Valentine! Was it really so necessary to frighten everyone? Shinra was so pleased when he and I spoke...and to be hustled out like this, my sister will, she was expecting me for breakfast...' Professor Gast Faremis carried no handkerchief on his person; in lieu he pressed his shirtsleeve against his brow. 'Mr Valentine, please, you are here to _assist_. I do not want to lose a willing staff on the basis of a misunderstanding!'

V. Valentine let his arm drop, and appeared to consider this. His calm was immaculate above the knot of his tie; his fingers, Lucrecia saw, flicked inside his cuffs. 

'Listen, Gast,' Lucrecia said, 'I'm not frightened, thank you for your concern,' she intended to decorate that with irony, but instead sounded stupidly sincere, 'I'm simply withholding my opinion until someone tells me what's going on. I thought -- well. You're in Midgar, too. You know what I thought.'

'I'm with the lady,' said Hojo. 'I'm definitely not as frightened as a kitten in a sack, especially not considering the recent bout of accidents and long term holidays that hit up my department's head officers.'

'Goodness, Doctor,' Ifalna murmured, trace amusement. ' _That's_ about as clear as a presidential directive.'

Hojo winked at her, though the gesture looked more a nervous twitch, if still somewhat endearing for its lack of smooth delivery. 'Paint my white coat blue and call me a bloody Turk.'

All three of them, as though united in a conspiracy of stubbornness, folded their arms. Lucrecia wondered if she would have been so brave in resistance without an audience. 

It took Gast's aimless, yet desperate hand-waving to draw from the Turk his response. V. Valentine spoke reluctantly, as though moved only to spare Gast his exertions. 'I can confirm you're not being arrested. Obviously. There should have been several cues to alert you all to this fact: the lack of handcuffs, the notable lack of an armored guard. This is a government, ladies and gents, and despite the martial law declared - in defence of the city, I will reiterate! - we don't act in the shadows, or without good reason. This move is a change in location of your employment, which Shinra, according to all of your contracts, has the definitive right to action. You're exemplary citizens of Midgar, and experts in your respective fields, hence your current involvement. I should not have to defend my nation to her own citizens, but here, you want to hear it? You all have nothing to fear.'

'Thank you,' Gast said.

'Then why the faffing?' Hojo asked, bluntly. 'Why not give us the time to wrap up our own work first? We haven't even packed equipment!'

'AVALANCHE,' Ifalna murmured, so quietly only Lucrecia, in close proximity to the other woman, startled to hear. The rebels attempted to sabotage every one of Shinra's projects on principle. Wielding self-recrimination like a cudgel, Lucrecia had not thought of the dangers of an external threat.

V. Valentine confirmed what he could not have heard. 'The subterfuge thus far has been articulated to avoid alerting AVALANCHE of the significance of this project, on which you will be briefed in Costa Del Sol. Any correspondence you'd like to send to your family or friends will of course be permitted so long as it's within the constraints of your confidentiality agreements.'

The offer of freedom, a symbolic letter or telegram delivered, gave Lucrecia a disproportionate relief. She shook her head at herself; she had taught herself to catch the seeds of sentiment before they could sprout. To whom would she address her correspondence, her research assistant, or her computer's repairman?

'I suppose Shinra wouldn't have bothered with his letter if we were being disappeared.' Hojo unfolded his arms. He was the first to collect his bag, which trailed an incongruously bright and anonymous strip of fabric from a zipper too strained to close; uniformly, the Doctor wore grays and blacks, an urban camouflage.

'He surely would not have worded it so politely.' 

V. Valentine's fingers abused his cufflinks. His sleeves, Lucrecia decided, were an inch too long. The slight angle of Mr Valentine's chin downwards, and the corresponding curve of his lips upwards, seemed a calculated signal to inform them all of his good humour. In another circumstance, Lucrecia would have been compelled to laugh, but for that not even the outwardly good-natured Ifalna proved inclined to accept V. Valentine's humour at face value.

'Ahaha,' said Professor Gast, dutiful. 'This project will be the making of - this project will be - Ladies. This discovery is without precedent. I need your skills. I need your bravery. Please be assured you too are essential on this project; incomparably essential.'

Ifalna was the next to move, yet the decisiveness of her actions made it clear she was moved only by her own choice, neither Gast's encouragement or Hojo's example. Ifalna wore her moth-eaten rucksack across her back, which had Lucrecia wonder at Ifalna's status; she was reminded too sharply of a student's willing poverty, yet surely Ifalna was qualified? 

With her hands left free by her practicality, Ifalna collected Lucrecia's case, and placed the leather handles in Lucrecia's hand in passing.

'There you are, Ms Crescent.' Ifalna took the opportunity to indicate the uneven tile of the aging station, where the wheels on Lucrecia's suitcase might catch, and the object itself turn and wrench her wrist.

'Thank you,' Lucrecia said by default, and smiled in return.

The train accelerated once they were all aboard, with such engineering that Lucrecia scarcely swayed.


	4. Chapter 4

In defiance of Lucrecia's expectations, the funeral was heavily attended. 

Lucrecia recognised the registrar, four uneasy scientists, seven gathered General U students, and near fifty once-refugees, marked as such by the mix of style and tradition in the cut of their clothes and hair. They gathered in the lane between the chapel's seats. The riot of colour and fabric appeared homogenous in such a confused proximity, as though all colours, when mixed, could only ever generate a grey blur of indistinction. 

Grimoire had not been poor. He had brought Shinra such miracles of existence, his continued poverty would have been an insult to the President himself. His funeral may not have been a company affair, nor even a matter of state, but his chapel was atop the plate, located in the same sunny suburb as his apartment had been. Lucrecia had not considered that Grimoire's associates might not have been bound by Midgar's geography of class. 

Only honest citizens of Midgar could travel the plate's vertical boundary. Everyone present here would have to be certified, no refugees, no troublemakers, none of the political incendiaries who insisted corporate policy could not rule a nation. The knowledge of her safety did little to comfort one whose upbringing had been as cloistered as her years of study. The gathering used Midgar's tongue as a common ground, but a common ground inverted, the familiar strange. The babble sounded foreign and repetitive, rising and falling, a superstitious relic of a ritual muttered against or for the spirit of a man taken beyond terrestrial concerns. 

Lucrecia believed not at all in an afterlife, but Grimoire had. She respected him too much to turn away, though she longed to do so. She felt as though he had betrayed her.

She had thought her respect was something unique in the man's life. He had responded with a self-conscious effort of repaying all her small respects with ones of his own, as though unaccustomed to people treating with him so honourably. The presence of so many at his funeral made it apparent that Grimoire Valentine had been an important man to others as well, a community minded man; the veritable champion of the rights of all of Midgar's citizens. Lucrecia should not have been so surprised. Grimoire had always struggled against injustice. Grimoire believed in people. In Midgar's cramped space, there could be no such thing as a private universe, and she recognized her own foolishness to have felt so moved by the man. What she had with Grimoire was not at all special.

Lucrecia placed one palm on the doorframe and swayed, for she had yet to enter. She did not know which crowd to join, and her solitude was suspect. Lucrecia was neither a student nor a scientist, nor a common acquaintance. Her relationship with Grimoire made her feel unacceptably like a woman. She could see no dense cluster of young women, only the wives and matrons of other men, and she could not see herself talking to those. In general conversation Lucrecia held her silence at times when another woman would have offered candor.

The sudden unified motion of the crowd to be seated spared Lucrecia her decision.

Lucrecia said nothing as the registrar spoke his words of constructed sorrow. Many of the crowd were crying, though she did not. The comfort given was much as Midgar itself: hot, sweaty, and always the same. Grimoire had been a great man, a generous man. Honour him. Never forget him.

Without a body, the funeral held only words and a certificate of honour from President Shinra himself. An orderly queue formed in order that the respects of all could be paid, the kisses of men and women pressed to Grimoire's stenciled name. Waves of shame wracked Lucrecia, leaving her cold, clammy and immobile. She wondered if the crowd would turn against her if they knew what she knew about Grimoire's death. She suspected they would not. She expected there would come only pity, boundless, endless stares so laden with pity, pats on her head, words of futile comfort. Wide-eyed Lucrecia, fair and uncertain, hourglass curves and inappropriate tongue; she could not possibly be a murderer. She was nothing more than what she was, and was to be pitied for her inability to accept this.

She neglected a cab, and walked back to her apartment. 

Distantly, she could hear the sirens sound sub-plate to signal the shift change. It was a sound as unremarkable as the train whistles and the sirens of Midgar's frequent patrols; she noted the shift-change only when she realised she had heard not the expected one, but two sirens. 

It was nightfall, and she had not reached her apartment. She had not stopped walking.

She had come to one of the Sector stairs.

It was as her memory told her it should be: a cage of iron, black against the sky but red where it met this false earth. Inevitably, rust crept upwards from the humidity trapped below the plate. 

Lucrecia did not want to go below. 

She had not been below since the last time she had seen her parents, the day of her graduation, the end of her scholarship funds, and the commencement of her adult autonomy. Thought of her parents struck Lucrecia with the force of realisation. Her footsteps had been to the pace of rehearsed words yet unspoken. 

Grimoire's son had not attended the funeral.

She had never seen him. She had only been informed of his existence casually, a chance mention of my son, but she felt sure she would have known him. 

She had intended to apologise. Grimoire's son would not have forgiven her, of course not, but surely she could have been awarded some relief? Some understanding? Both she and he now shared their orphanhood.

The guard at the Sector stair ignored Lucrecia, even when her knees folded. They were atop the plate. It was not illegal to sit on the grass and stare at nothing, even at this hour.


	5. Chapter 5

Lucrecia's Midgar had been a world known in parts. Several streets, a few cafes, one apartment; Lucrecia lived the life of a claustrophobe, fighting to avoid the sheer size and scope of this city born of one man's dreaming.

Lucrecia had never been out of Midgar, and without the interference of Shinra's Turks, she never would have left. The train pulled her away, faster than she had thought possible, until the scale of her existence was suddenly revealed by a hard curve of the tracks: for the first time, Lucrecia saw Midgar.

She had lived in such a tiny world considering Midgar's size. Lucrecia looked at what she left behind. Midgar had such grandeur. Lights and haze, the mako glow and the sparks of motion around the ring; depending on the light, the dawn sun rising behind the industrial haze, Midgar was either a city built upon a cloud, or buoyed by a brilliant flame. 

Even stripped of its poetry, all rusted steel and condensation clouds, it should have been impossible for such a city to exist. 

The revelation did not unsettle Lucrecia for long. She ignored her fear, which she felt sourced in some primal irrationality, and fixed on her irritation, which was quantifiable and justified. She was known in Midgar, her name and face, her role, her skills; removed from her context, how could she redefine herself as easily as her past six years of study could do?

The train followed a further curve, which matched the angle of the rising sun and allowed a painful directness of light into the cabin. Lucrecia did not squint, or raise her hand to her eyes. She snapped the blinds closed.

* * *

There was a light and unexpected meal set out in the dining cabin, a buffet which Lucrecia's newest associates, with the exception of Professor Gast Faremis, ignored. Gast chose stand by the very end of the buffet and contemplate the contents with a focus that suggested the depths of the sago could hold the answers to all his questions. As he pondered, he nibbled on a carrot stick, taking such small bites that it seemed the sound of his digestive commencement would never end. 

Lucrecia would have been pleased to encourage a sense of solidarity by also ignoring what must have been the absent Mr Valentine's efforts to have them ease into their new roles, but for that her schedule and the sudden rush of her armoured collection service of this morning had left her small time to eat. She claimed two slices of well-buttered toast, one cup of clear soup, and returned for a cup of coffee. She sat opposite Doctor Hojo, where he stared with one eye narrowed at her coffee. 

He indicated. 'Is it any good?'

Ifalna sat at the other end of the table, where she did not face the table but faced outwards instead. Her posture permitted a certain privacy to the fledgling conversation, yet Lucrecia's sensitivity to flirtation made her sharply aware that Ifalna was likely eavesdropping.

Shortly, Lucrecia said: 'I haven't tasted it yet.'

'I like to get in preemptively,' Hojo said, and smiled. 'Let me know if it's worth my time?'

Doctor Hojo's smile, while biased to one side by a habit of talking to the side of his mouth, was nevertheless unfeigned. A certain good-natured air surrounded him. His was not an intelligence that lent itself to easy conversation, yet, daunted by the thought that anything could be beyond him, he tried. For his intelligence and good nature, he was forgiven the social awkwardness that manifested as mistimed statements, which sounded as though he intended to impress depth of meaning onto even the most mundane of statements. 

Nevertheless, Hojo presented with an easiness of being, of one at such peace with life that even tact was unnecessary. His inner peace was not an acceptance of his lot, for he thought himself a chronic striver. Rather, he had long since accepted that other people would often be fully resigned to their own lives. The hardest task would be to change a person's mind; far easier, Hojo had often thought, to change the world itself. Lucrecia Crescent interested him because of her works, which presented a far more fundamentalist image than this slightly uncertain woman who sat, narrow-lipped and with a resistant quirk to one groomed eyebrow, as though concerned her slightest motion might result in her accidental hurling of her crockery across the cabin. 

She looked, Hojo decided, as though she was afraid to smile. He felt moved to smile in her stead, and did not expect a response.

Yet that lack of expectation had Lucrecia feel strangely free to respond, if a little more slyly than Hojo could have anticipated, to say: 'Do I look like your personal taster, Doctor? Next you'll be expecting me to bring you coffee in the mornings.'

'Hardly,' Hojo said, after a pause, and with the vowel disproportionately elongated. He tapped one finger alongside his nose, a gesture of unified conspiracy. 'We have our pet Turk for that, remember?'

The train rounded a curve, imperceptible but for the motion of the liquid aspects of Lucrecia's meal. Circumstance dictated Valentine enter the cabin on cue, and so he did. 

His presence appeared to catalyse a negative reaction, for everyone stilled. Gast's ceaseless carrot-chewing ended in a profound swallow.

The silent treatment did seem disproportionate to Mr Valentine's presentation, Lucrecia thought. From nape to heels he presented as would any a bluecoat, clad in competent threads, but there was something petulant about the set of his mouth, and the haircut defiantly in mode. The bluecoat reputation seemed to weigh the others' opinions. Lucrecia hunted for evidence of the being behind the Young Turks' deeds. She looked for a child who had spurned his parents, and been spurned in return. Lucrecia defined the half-smile on Valentine's lips as nothing more than Grimoire's own confidence, turned instead to a desperate, defensive arrogance.

'We'll be arriving at the tunnel shortly,' Mr Valentine said. 'A full briefing will take place in Costa del Sol.' 

He did have too deep a voice for the image of an uncertain child Lucrecia was building in her mind, but she was not daunted. 

Without meaning, as though he had been taught to do so, Mr Valentine added: 

'You can call me Vincent.'

At that moment, they discovered how a bluecoat defined 'shortly', for they were plunged into an instant darkness. The tunnel, Lucrecia thought, and stilled her hand; the rattle of her cup against its saucer would betray her. Gast had been the only one of them facing in the correct direction to anticipate the tunnel, and he had failed - again - to warn them of the approach. 

Ifalna laughed on the tail of her shocked gasp. The delay was only a moment before the lights sprang to light. The new mako globes did not flicker, yet it took some moments for shocked eyes to adjust. 

In that time, as though undisturbed by total darkness, Vincent had seated himself beside Lucrecia.

Hojo announced: 'Alright, Turk, so if you're coming to the party, let's play a game. Do be a gracious host.'

Vincent kept his hands beneath the table. Lucrecia wondered if he wore a gun, then derided her own thought: of course he did. Only the Turks and Midgar's old guard still wielded guns.

'I have cards.' Vincent's offering seemed incongruous in its normality.

'I was thinking Twenty Questions,' Hojo said. 'You've a tight lip, though, don't you? We could always play charades.'

Vincent said, this time with almost a sneer, 'One question. And then you can wait until we arrive at Costa del Sol. You should be glad to see your home again, Doctor.'

Lucrecia realized Vincent had thought Hojo's initial proposal an innocent one. Her realization added substance to her impression of him as nothing more than Grimoire's lost child. She did not notice Hojo's flinch, nor recognize Vincent's latter statement as carrying a warning: Vincent knew more of Hojo than Hojo ever would of him. Any games they played would not be on a level field.

'I've never been out of Midgar,' Lucrecia felt compelled to add. 'But I know Costa del Sol's too hot to be where we're going, considering the demand we bring warm clothes.'

Hojo waved a hand scarred with mako burn. 'As the lady says, Mr Valentine. But to be honest, I'm thinking our destination is actually irrespective of our task. I don't care where we're going. So, one question, you say. It's more than I was expecting.'

'It's more than I should be giving,' Vincent said. 'Except in the interests of goodwill, of course.'

'Of course.' Hojo's mouth twitched to the side. 'And I can trust in the much-vaunted honour of a bluecoat to answer truthfully?'

Mr Valentine's smile drew tight. 'Turks don't lie.'

'You just kill people who know the truth?'

Lucrecia fought for a phrase to deflect the sudden tense mood, and found herself addressing Hojo: 'Is that your one question?'

The Doctor laughed, at ease. 'Alright, let's play in earnest. To deduce what I don't need to ask: one, I know Ifalna, she's GPU's lab assistant, hazardous materials and biochemical standards. Two, I know the Professor by name. Theological archaeology, from memory, eh, Gast?'

Sucking on a new carrot stick, and in general having spent the last hour lamenting how readily circumstances had escaped his control, Gast felt oddly limited by the Doctor's sudden reference. Hojo's own reputation was one of vagrant genius, and his summary of Gast's lifetime of work in two words was dismissive, truthful as it was. Gast wondered if now would be an appropriate time to mention his editorship of Old Science Weekly and his somewhat all-encompassing hobby of amateur film, anything to define himself outside of Hojo's scope. Gast resisted his instinct to snipe. He knew more than Hojo knew of their task, and would have been willing to talk behind the Turk's back to those who must serve as his staff: yet Hojo had ignored his chance through all the long silent moments they had inhabited this cabin, uninterrupted. 

Gast grunted an acknowledgement. But, before Hojo could open his mouth again, Gast said, quickly, to qualify his ejaculation: 

'But of the Cetran mode of theological evolution, Doctor. Certainly not of the naturalist mode.'

'Which brings us to Lucrecia Crescent,' Hojo continued, with a relentless and uncouth glee, 'who is fundamentally of the naturalist school of evolution. The Natural Theory of WEAPON Evolution as her non-qualifying graduating thesis; and the more widely accepted Natural Theory of Materia Evolution. I'll note the second as being of far more value than the first, Lucrecia, and the primary standard for my own exploration of artificial materia generation.' 

'I'm flattered,' Lucrecia said. The blush that waged war on a Midgarian's native pallor could have made her words an evasion born of social convention. As if to disparage her own polite response, as she was stung by the fact that Hojo's praise had come in the company of his criticism, Lucrecia added, 'I'm afraid I don't know of you, Doctor. Or indeed, of any of you.'

Lucrecia spoke the last with a speed that turned an otherwise mellow voice into a higher, unnatural key. Beside her, Vincent moved his shoulders, as though cracking his knuckles beneath the table. Lucrecia expected nothing more than to be called out in a lie.

'How odd,' Hojo said. 'You work at General U. Did you live in a box?'

Gast bit his carrot stick in half.

'I do know Professor Gast,' Ifalna offered. 'I run carbon dating for him, on occasion.'

'And on all occasions, I have been very impressed with your methodology,' Gast said. 'I had had such difficulties with the techs on No 32. Your presence was a blessing.'

Ifalna smiled, if only undirected. 'Quite rightly appreciated, Professor. What you gave me wasn't exactly typical.'

'Aha,' Hojo said. His excitement appeared spurred more by inspiration than a deduction based on reason; he tapped his knuckles on the table repeatedly, the rhythm of a triumphant march. 'And our Valentine already asserted that Shinra's friendly neighborhood sniper is pointed well away. We haven't done anything wrong, we aren't being pulled away to be punished with vast media silence, which means-'

'This isn't another incident in Shinra's history of political violence,' Gast could not help but say, in patriarchal tones that longed for argument. 'This is an opportunity to end all violence!'

'Shinra's eternal war against reason,' Ifalna murmured. 'The unnamed monsters who war against Shinra's order. The war against the Planet, if we believe AVALANCHE's claims. In fact, Professor, you sound almost like a member of AVALANCHE, except that they promote the ideal of peace through the violent overthrow of Shinra himself.'

Unnoticed by any but for Lucrecia, proximal to Vincent's heat, Mr Valentine tensed. All motion beneath the table ceased.

'No,' Gast said, half a stutter and half anger, 'of course I'm not AVALANCHE, how dare-'

'Time to break out the cocktails, Valentine.' Hojo tapped the table one last time. 'Cetran theological archaeologist suddenly spouting revolutionary and non-violent ends to all violence? I'll have a Cetran corpse on ice, with added Promised Land.'

What Hojo did with that statement, he could not have anticipated. Vincent did not think the Doctor's deduction skills at all worthy of note: he made a mental note instead that Gast could not be trusted with information, that the Professor would leak like a sieve, given the chance. Ifalna did not gasp, as she had when the tunnel shocked them all with darkness. She felt as though the earth had moved in ways unfamiliar; and when the dislocation of that sensation settled, it was as though a purpose previously vague had congealed in her throat. She did not allow hope to burgeon unwarranted, but her inborn and sorely tried belief in a benign global intelligence felt again like a warm glow, not the pain it had become over her long years thinking herself alone. For Lucrecia, she felt a similar upheaval, but one that came unfortunately close to her previous shock at the sight of Grimoire Valentine's son. For years she had ignored the guilt surrounding the matter of Grimoire's passing, secure in the knowledge that his sacrifice had, at the least, given her substantial evidence towards a world ruled entirely by chance. Lucrecia argued against all the old mythologies and outmoded religions that the Cetra did not and had not existed. What evidence did they have of a divine retribution, a judgment that would fall from the sky? All Cetran relics could be explained by processes of natural evolution; to believe in a Cetra was to believe in the untested truth of an old wives' tale of boiled frogs curing coughs. If the Cetra existed, then so too did Lucrecia's guilt. What had Grimoire died for, if not her own proof?

Yet the world's axial tilt was not visible by any.

'Good gods,' Gast said, after his own disgust at Hojo's manner had curdled. 'This isn't a game, Doctor.'

'I don't know,' Ifalna said, somewhat lower than her usual tone. 'I thought it was rather fun, right up until Hojo won. Don't you think so?'

With all other occupants of the room being male, Lucrecia felt herself unduly targeted by the question.

'Oh yes,' Lucrecia said. 'No one likes delusional fantasists, Doctor.'

'Tosh,' Hojo said. 'Just because a Cetran corpse would disprove both your theories, Crescent. Of course it's a Cetra. Why else are we toting along a freezer? Even WEAPONs don't get this treatment, WEAPONs are a gil a gallon these days.'

'Vincent.' Lucrecia needed stability, and if Hojo had been the one to rock the world, then only Vincent would be able to right it. 'You still owe us an answer.'

'That I do,' the Turk agreed. 'Do you have a question, ma'am?'

'Tell us where we're going,' Lucrecia said.

Having already discounted the importance of such a question, Hojo ignored her.

Vincent did not. 

Vincent found himself remembering Lucrecia's prior ignored revelation, that she had never been outside of Midgar; he remembered as well how she had looked behind herself while waiting for the train, as though she had left behind something important. Vincent had never associated himself with his immediate geography, having been dislocated so extensively through his youth and his profession, but he could detect somewhat of shock in the way Lucrecia asked. So demanding, as though a strident desperation lurked beneath the unyielding cover. Lucrecia's vulnerabilities showed only when she looked to the side, away or behind, in the surprisingly slender curve of her neck beneath that weight of hair.

'Nibelheim,' Vincent answered.

Even moved by pity, it did not justify that he followed information with further description. 

The last time Vincent had been in Nibelheim, the Mt Nibel reactor had been but a shadow in Shinra's eye, and Nibelheim's mayor the prophylactic. In retrospect, and certainly in the way Vincent now described it, his lone hike through Mt Nibel's haunted pass had been one of the most beautiful experiences in his life. 

In fact, Vincent had never considered that small town's colloquial beauty worth of note until he felt moved, now, to note it. Vincent's audience had grown, even Gast standing near, and Ifalna's gaze no longer so distant; lounging back on his chair, even Hojo appeared to be listening. Soul of a poet, as the Professor said in tones of surprise, but Vincent decided he had betrayed nothing more than his own wide-travelled nature. He ensured he made constant reference to other cities that he would not appear without objectivity before the objective minds of scientists. Nibelheim lacked the Saucer's zazz, but did possess somewhat of Gongaga's homey warmth. Unlike the still-traditionalist Gongaga, Nibelheim had a bar that permitted women to drink, and as such, Vincent would be pleased to acquaint them all with it.

Under words that Vincent intended as hyperbole, there was a sentiment that Lucrecia felt for, and strongly. Rightly so, for it was for her, home-based, land-bound and so proud, that Vincent was moved to move another, when he had been trained to disregard all forms of human discomfort. 

Vincent thought he pitied Lucrecia, a creature as alien to him as the frozen god on their trailing carriage.


	6. Chapter 6

In Costa del Sol, the unexpected nightlife swallowed them whole. However, it was the nature of scientists and bluecoats to remain undigested; they moved through the crowds as evident strangers, forever observant and wary of participation. 

Accustomed to Midgar's density and the accompanying maintenance of personal space, Lucrecia felt disturbed that in streets scarcely occupied, people jostled her to oppression. The local dress, or absence of, presented as a visual force greater than numbers. She resisted the urge to count nipples.

Unlike Midgar's humidity, the warmth here was pleasant enough, a radiated heat from stone walls, a brisk breeze rising from the ocean. As they followed Hojo's confident lead through the main winding street, Lucrecia could not help her eyes returning repeatedly to the ocean's expanse. It was exactly what she expected: she had seen it before. She must have. She could not consider that her whole life had gone without the sight of the ocean. Her fingertips trailed along the wall that bordered the fall to the sands, sandstone worn smooth with countless similar strokes.

'Lucrecia,' Vincent said, softly, from behind her.

Tailing them all, surely Vincent did not suspect the half-clad civilians of unworthy conduct. Unheard at their head, Hojo muttered to Ifalna that Vincent played a not-so-subtle rearguard against their retreat. Lucrecia read Vincent's position differently: and as if to reinforce her perception of his caring, each time her steps lagged, Vincent spoke. 

Her steps lagged often, yet he did not move to touch her until now, as though her passive persistence had overcome his reserve. 

The stretch of his hand made as though to cup her elbow. 

She stared. Suddenly, the thought of walking arm in arm with Vincent struck her as incongruous. She had imagined taking him by the hand. 

Every street corner seemed to host a guitar band and several singers; as they walked, the musical collision was constant enough to interfere with Lucrecia's ability to focus. She realised she had slowed this time for her own relief, discovering unnoticed a small pocket of calm. Into that calm, Vincent's pronunciation of her name lingered.

'I'm so sorry,' Lucrecia said, with an undeserved emphasis for the nature of her crime. 'I'll keep up.'

The bar was one of Hojo's recommendation. In confirmation of Vincent's knowledge, Hojo admitted that he had lived here for the majority of his childhood. Oddly enough considering the studious bent of his shoulders, the setting suited Hojo, the length of his tail unremarkable, sloping shoulders seen more as relaxation than devotion to his desk. 

Seated at sunset, they watched in relative silence as the ocean's blue turned to black. 

A woman wearing flowers lit scented lamps to battle back the night. It was past sunset when the true alienness of their setting at last struck Lucrecia with force: Midgar was the city of light, even the drop-off from the edge backlit by the sectors below. Here, the ocean's very blackness appeared as though the world itself barely held its edge whole against a salt-smelling, depthless nothingness. All the lamps in the world could not light the gulf. 

Lucrecia felt moved enough to say: 'It's as though everything ends here.'

With his own conversational agenda pending, and without the social confidence to broach the topic on his own, Gast responded explosively. 'But this is just the beginning, Lucrecia! A whole realm of research opens to us all!'

Lucrecia's mood curdled at his tone. 'Professor,' said without evident rancor, 'I think I would appreciate it if you referred to me as Ms Crescent. I referenced only the scenery, but if we're to discuss work exclusively, we should probably maintain a fixed working relationship.'

Hojo chortled.

Gast was old enough to have resented the incursion of Midgar's first rank of female graduates into the professional workforce, yet he did not bridle at Lucrecia's comment. It struck him completely unawares. As evenly as she has aired her request, he responded: 'If that is your preference, Ms Crescent, though you should feel free to call me what you like.'

'This,' Hojo said to Ifalna, he grinning and she with eyes a-gleam in lamplight, 'is what we in the uppers of General U's territorial disputations like to call "establishing desk space". As you can tell, qualifications aside, what we have here is a vital conflict of core ideologies. Gast will believe the Cetra is a Cetra even if it looks like a goat; Gast believes in the Cetran intervention, and has spent the past fifty years digging up mangled skeletons and believing they're proof of the Ancients on the planet. Ms Crescent, on the other hand, has spent the past six years arguing that without a modicum of proof, the Cetra surely never existed, and that all trace of their existence --'

'The WEAPONs,' Ifalna inserted, with a vague air that said she hoped Hojo's patronage would derail as easily as a train.

'-including the WEAPONs are actually derived through the miracle of mere natural evolution. Imagine the likelihood of biotechnology evolving itself together, if you will.'

'I resent that,' Gast said. For the first time since embarking, he felt a sudden relief at speaking the truth: he was compelled to repeat himself. 'I do, I do resent that, Doctor. One can't sum up an entire lifetime of endeavor in two sentences -- and it's only been twenty years, Hojo -- Doctor.' He spoiled his own surety with petulance: 'I'm scarcely as old as fifty years of study would indicate.'

At that point, their drinks arrived. 

Vincent paid, Lucrecia noticed, from a distance. Obscurely, she felt ashamed. She had never liked being bought.

Hojo accepted his pint glass with an assumption that someone else would always be buying. 'Oh, please, you can call me Hojo, Gast. It's not as though I have the luxury to make a distinction between a private and working life. So much to disprove, so little time to do it.'

Hojo wielded his arrogance with the hope that another would rise to cross his blade. Lucrecia tasted her wine. She inhaled deeply.

'Despite our differences,' Lucrecia said, 'I welcome the opportunity your discovery has presented us, Professor. I've set myself as a stand-alone in Midgar's scientific hierarchy in my attempts to prove the WEAPONs are purely evolutionary beasts, simply because the idea of fate and pre-destined power and -- and the final judgment have all seemed so out of date. Residues of old mythologies. In this day and age, with materia now harnessed and the summons fully understood, it's sheer ignorance to continue believing in some higher power. Did you know some tribes out there still believe their summons are independent gods?'  
'Good grief,' Ifalna murmured.

Lucrecia continued. 'How can I, a trained scientist, rightly believe in the Cetran presence as anything but another kind of myth? Watchmen, or angels, or Ancients, whatever they're called, all the stories sell them as higher powers or a global consciousness to the planet - this Lifestream ideology as a living thing, not just an energy source. Well, to believe in that is to believe that we're all playing like children in a garden, watched by some higher authority. I can't get behind that, Gast. Shinra doesn't get behind that, Shinra knows the Lifestream is exactly what it is, a source of energy, finite and understandable.'

'I wouldn't say we understand mako,' Hojo said. 'Where does it come from? Where does it go? We only know what it does, not why it does it.'

Lucrecia waved that aside as an irrelevant distraction: she would be heard. 'We are our own beings, Professor. Yet the lack of proof of Cetran existence contradictorily has somehow become proof that they did exist! As though by leaving nothing behind of themselves, they must have all ascended bodily to this myth-born Promised Land.' 

Lucrecia allowed herself some irony of tone, and a smile for ease. Gast merely blinked.

'Midgar,' Lucrecia said, and quelled the pang of sentiment she felt at the name, 'has proved the only civilization on this planet to take steps away from the concept of predestination. I say, at last. I say your discovery might present us with the final proof we need, and for that, I embrace this opportunity. Even if the Cetra did exist in some form, they must have been terrestrial beings for you to dig up a fossil. I welcome wholeheartedly the opportunity to prove my theories right.'

'Conversely, you might have to change your mode of thought. Ms Crescent.' At Lucrecia's side, Hojo tapped her wineglass with a fingernail. 'You should have ordered the white, not the red. Your cheeks are flushed.'

Gast had not looked away from Lucrecia as she spoke, though at Hojo's interruption his gaze unfocused. A strange, almost surreal calm came across his features.

'You would not speak like that if you'd seen her,' Gast said, quietly.

Ifalna has been so nonchalant in her pose as observer that Lucrecia had nearly forgotten her presence. The young woman said, with indifference: 'Her?' 

'Her name is Jenova. President Shinra gave me the honour of naming her.'

'The name is out of mythology,' Ifalna said. 'Shinra must be rethinking his denouncement of pre-Midgar theology to let you call her that.'

'She came from the sky,' Gast said, singsong, as though reciting. 'She came from the sky, just like an angel, with wings. You should see her wings. Not beautiful - not by our standards. But so wonderful. Jenova.'

The band played into the sudden absence of conversation. 

At the name Lucrecia's thoughts fled, the argument she had wished to continue, the complaint. Jenova. For all that Grimoire had discovered Omega, it had been Lucrecia's research that gave him the key: he had asked her what she would call this new WEAPON. And so, unblooded, unqualified, Lucrecia named Omega. Of a contradictory mind at the best of times, she had dug through the old mythologies to find a word as ominous as the WEAPON's final function proved under study. 

Lucrecia knew the power of words; yet she did not know why Jenova's name seemed fit to wipe her consciousness. Jenova: the sky's eventful fall.

Vincent had not sat after distributing their drinks. He spoke from over Lucrecia's head. 'Ms Crescent, your own studies on the WEAPONs - do you think the Professor's find will allow you the key to their activation? If they are Cetran-derived creations, it seems logical that the key to their control would be in a Cetran form.'

Hojo laughed into his glass, hollow. 'A bluecoat talking logic.'

Spurred by that, and well aware that both her exceptions and exclusions would be noted and interpreted, Lucrecia said, 'You should call me Lucrecia, Vincent. I can't see us having much of a working relationship.'

'Very interesting,' Hojo said. 'And to the point. Why are you here, Vincent?'

The Turk responded without hesitation. 'For your own protection, Doctor.'

'I'll believe that when she,' Hojo nudged Lucrecia with his elbow, and grinned, 'believes in Cetran intervention.'

'Why are you here?' Lucrecia rebutted, provoked by that familiar elbow. 'Gast and I are self-explanatory. Ifalna has the capacity to assist us both - what's your role, Doctor?'

Hojo shrugged. 'I'm the maverick genius, of course. I started out in laser physics, in long distance precision; I'm a sniper with an eighteen storey cannon. But then I got bored, and that was right around the time they discovered the mako reactors were leaking like chaos into the surrounding environment, including Midgar's grounds, so while the plate was being built to get away from the contaminated ground, I was re-engineering the design of the reactors to prevent future energy loss. After which, the incidents with the monsters in the wilderness had increased to plague proportions, enough that agriculture was dramatically suffering, and so I got into biotechnology and mako engineering and attempted to create biotechnological weapons. Much like small scales of the WEAPONs, actually. We were hoping we could repel the monster plague.'

'I take it the effort didn't work,' Gast said. 'The numbers are becoming prohibitive to travel, I've heard.'

'Notwithstanding,' Hojo said, 'the intent was there. A maverick genius. And now I'm here, and I hope I'm not going to be bored.'

'Well,' Ifalna said, 'failing genius, you could always be the team's comedian. There's certainly a joke on someone somewhere around here.'

Hojo grinned, delighted. 'We all know ourselves for a farce. Roleplay's all the more fun when we get to improvise.'


	7. Chapter 7

Some days out of Costa del Sol, the terrain became rough even for prefabricated rails, the train's progress slowing to a serpentine, vertical climb. Contemplation of the rugged rock through the cabin's windows did little to comfort: rising dust trails marked the location of monsters keeping pace, abiding their distance. Lucrecia had spent the first three days thinking them other vehicles, as the dust trail looked so similar to that raised by the train, only to be told the better by Vincent, in passing.

Pending motion sickness, and with Ifalna's invitation and example to uphold, Lucrecia had taken the opportunity through a particularly rough stretch to ease her legs. As the train negotiated an upwards incline of rock, Lucrecia powered along beside Ifalna's easy pace. Neither woman breathed faster for all their effort, both of them having experienced Midgar's endless stairs, but it was notable that Ifalna moved with an ease that had her appear as though she belonged, her hips narrow and always aligned with the direction of her feet. Lucrecia's pace seemed driven by an internal combustion engine that operated in piston'd fits and starts, her hips inscribing a wasteful figure-eight with each forward step. 

There was no road on this route, but Lucrecia started to realized that for this once, the rising dust plumes that kept apace were actually vehicles. It was then she felt the first inclination towards familiar unease: the tension that held Lucrecia in place, still back in Midgar, had dissipated with the distance of an ocean behind them, only to return abruptly. Ahead lay the narrow canyon through which the train would have to pass. The first carriage entered.

Having never experienced this before, Lucrecia abruptly recognized an ambush, too late. 

The vehicles drawing closer navigated not in a single line but side by side, to avoid the ruts and dust that each other trailer left behind, so it seemed they were more an invading armada encroaching upon this strange landscape than four small trucks. 

It was then that the first explosion went off, some distance along the track, just far enough that had Lucrecia been of a condition to notice, she would have noted the distance allowed the train full time to stop, in safety.

Standing at some distance, Lucrecia and Ifalna watched in a compatible silence as the train's complement of staff disgorged. Vincent was notable from this distance by the navy across his shoulders; blue, even a sky blue, was of no colour that nature in this region could produce. There were some five other men, Lucrecia counted, Vincent at their heart as he gave some curt instruction. She had never seen the other inhabitants of their train before. Of course, she had not expected that Vincent turned himself to cooking their meals, but she had not thought past their solitary cabin to determine who did do the cooking at all. 

Vincent did appear to be the only true bluecoat present; he carried only a gun, and his own presence. The others, masked and by the size of their blades, were all members of Shinra's private army.

Over the jagged crest came a very small army, clad in the greens and greys of AVALANCHE, a pattern of camouflage Lucrecia would not have believed could have worked had she not struggled to pick a count. They wielded primitive firearms and materia, which proved a greater aid to determining a count - Lucrecia counted the flares of firepower. 

Lucrecia strove to put a count on their attackers as though a definable 'number' would make this circumstance real and manageable. Ifalna tried to draw her away by her hand, but Lucrecia shook free. It seemed nothing could be so important as counting their attackers.

Far distant, Vincent knelt on one knee. Calmly, he set aside his handgun, and withdrew rifle and sight from beneath his jacket. He fitted the two together with an ease of long practice, took aim and fired. 

A blurred, man-sized piece of the landscape would become motionless for each bullet the Turk fired. Aware of the blast of Vincent's gun in the same way she was aware of each spark of firepower from the AVALANCHE attackers, Lucrecia felt mildly irritated at how difficult this was making it for her to complete her count.

Ifalna grew frantic in her efforts to draw Lucrecia free from this spell of shock. Lucrecia would not be shaken.

Whether it was the distance of the attackers still, or perhaps Vincent's competence, there was an absence of melodrama from the whole scenario. 

Lucrecia did feel disturbed by her own calm. She was suspicious of how she readily could trust in a competent figure's right to deprive another of their freedoms: Vincent killed, and killed, and killed, simply because he could. She trusted his competence instinctively; she distrusted her own instinct. 

Conscious of having spent her whole life behaving so, on this landscape as alien as the moon itself, Lucrecia could be critical of her own manner. Her tendency to conform to social expectation was peculiar in a location without society. Compellingly, Lucrecia felt motivated by pity to stand and watch and count, when in Midgar she would have - and had - turned her eyes and hurried by. The men and women of the oncoming AVALANCHE, misguided terrorists though they might be, were dying. 

Ifalna regarded the scene of Vincent's massacre as though each detail of that scene filled her with a fascinated horror. 'Our friendly neighbourhood sniper, indeed.'

'We should get back to the train now,' Lucrecia said, or more precisely, ordered, despite having ignored all of Ifalna suggestions to the similar. Her throat turned the words to a rasp.

A shadow passed over them. Lucrecia was conscious of it solely out of annoyance, for the sun was pleasant enough in what Vincent called this land's winter, and the shadow was cold.

Ifalna screamed.

The great beast beat its wings, ragged fleshy things, which sent a cloud of dust to blind both women. Lucrecia clawed tears from her eyes, hearing nothing but the bird-thing's hollow cry, and Ifalna's persistent scream: 'I don't understand, I don't understand!'

Melodrama returned with the immediacy of attack. Lucrecia fought through cyclonic dust to find Ifalna's shoulders, and curled around the other woman. The contact did much to restore Lucrecia's sense of self, for even terrified here she was, with another more terrified than herself. 

Ifalna's hysteria was as odd a garment on the woman as Lucrecia had ever thought to find. 

Ifalna might have been impaled by Lucrecia's touch, for she stiffened and cried out: 'Don't go away!' with each word articulated against the storm as sharply as if she had meant each to stand alone: Don't! Go away!

The dust cloud subsided as rapidly as it had arisen. Lucrecia looked up to discover Vincent had delivered temporary salvation, or possibly his subordinates, for the air hung as heavy with the reek of scorched flesh as it did of gunpowder. The cries of the others were distant and incomprehensible; Lucrecia was obscurely ashamed to be found kneeling, and contented herself with soothing Ifalna's shuddering shoulders.

Vincent reloaded his handgun, eyes still skywards. The raw-fleshed bird was circling, and would bank as though it wanted to dive, but that Vincent would point his gun again. Lucrecia had not heard of the effectiveness of gunfire on monsters, but the beast had evidently been warned, for it would circle and bank again, vulturous. Vincent did not look down. Ifalna sucked in great gouts of air, as though she had been the one struck.

Lucrecia smiled, out of politeness, into the sun which was angled behind Vincent's crown in that cloudless winter sky. 

'Get back to the train.' Vincent's order was unambiguously such. A bead of sweat curled from his hairline to his chin; two, three quite pinkish, and the fourth black as blood; and then he was veiled with it.

'You're hurt.'

'Yes,' Vincent said. 'Though the suffering itself is often a matter of choice.' He turned to keep his eye fixed to the bird's frantic circles. 

Lucrecia's throat was too dry to swallow, though her mouth, conversely, seemed filled with fluid. She would have spat, had she any way to assure herself of the elegance of the action. 'For you, perhaps. I didn't ask to be brought out here, or set upon by terrorists or monsters, nor did Ifalna.'

Eyes still skyward, Vincent withdrew from an inner pocket what appeared to be a small pill, which he swallowed before replying. 'Have some pity, Ms Crescent, before you think to use another to make your point for you; I suggest you consider my suggestion seriously and take Ifalna back to the train, where her terror might ease a little, and which will leave me free to do my job and protect you both. Whatever suffering you do feel compelled to experience, be assured it will not be at the hands of either monsters or terrorists.'

Ifalna wrenched and rolled against a comfort that had never been more than self-satisfying. 

'I don't understand! Not where nature is - This world is no longer fit to live in!' 

'Come now,' Lucrecia said, 'it's just a monster, Ifalna, apparently they're everywhere now. And Vincent's scared it off.'

'It's a coincidence, not a monster.' Vincent could have been frowning. 'Two attacks heeled like that. The monsters aren't usually attracted by gunfire; AVALANCHE isn't usually scared off by monsters. Coincidence, or contrivance?'

Ifalna held Lucrecia by the wrists. 'It wasn't always a monster,' Ifalna said, urgent. 'Do you believe me? It wasn't always-'

'There, there,' Lucrecia said, knowing no other response to what appeared to be irrationality than to soothe.

'I believe you, girls,' Vincent said. 'Perhaps you should raise the topic for discussion with the gentlemen still safely on the train.'

His pre-occupation with their defense led his comment to appear indifferent, patronizing. Lucrecia was discomforted that Vincent seemed entirely unaware of this, not for Ifalna's offended sensibility, but for that he bitterly conformed with Lucrecia's general expectations. She was conditioned to awareness by her association with men too much like Hojo, like Gast, where Grimoire had been the point of difference. She did not like finding out Grimoire's son less than Grimoire himself.

'Your father would not have been so dismissive,' Lucrecia said. 

And with a moment of spite, Lucrecia realized her days of distance suddenly rendered worthless, a new currency placed upon the table.

Pale and bloody, Vincent met Lucrecia's eyes. 

The intensity within had her, even with her own propensity for cruelty well known to herself, quail.

'This land,' Ifalna spat, as though that four letter word but stood for another, 'has been made unfit to live in!'

Freed from the spell cast by Vincent's eyes, the wretched, half-mad bird dove to destroy those who had ventured into a territory not their own. All further conversation ended. Vincent wielded his pistol proficiently. The proximity and sound, of he, sweat and gunpowder and the cologne of his normality, turned into an unexpected terror for Lucrecia; the fleshy reek of blood the back door of a butcher's, the coiled stink of a bagwoman's spread-eagled legs; and the bird itself come full force with a second cyclone of its own rotting stink enough to have Lucrecia forget her own distance and cry out. 

The sound of that cry returned to her own ears as thin, reedy, desperate. Lucrecia willingly accepted for reality the circumstances which were truly upon her: she did as her treacherous nature commanded, and panicked.

Ifalna's practicality returned as Lucrecia's pretence at such departed. The former's meekness had been such a strange thing, considering her usual manner. Ifalna shoved Lucrecia stride for stride towards the train. Exhausted spasms left Lucrecia no room to protest, though a shame turned into something far more animal would have had her preference to run wild as a true beast off the edge of the sky itself. But for Ifalna's arm through her own, Lucrecia may well have done so.

As they entered the train, the narrow ladder forced the terror of their pace into a play at politeness, a pause for one to ascend before the other. When both had entered, Lucrecia silenced herself. 

Hojo, or possibly Gast, wrenched closed the door and barred it. 

'Doubts and suspicions,' Hojo said. He glanced out of the window and winced. 'For our own protection! I suppose I should apologise to the man if he gets back in here alive, it'd be only right to do that after all the bagging I've given him. Great god, the size of that thing!'

'Jenova is worth defending,' Gast said, uncertainly. 'Shinra knows that, and Mr Valentine is - one of his best, I was assured, though we are all vulnerable when in motion.'

'Shut up,' Lucrecia said. 

Out of respect for her and Ifalna's common breathlessness, or more likely entranced by the evident performance taking place outside the window Lucrecia would not look out of, the gentlemen complied.

After some time of silence, Vincent rejoined them to announce the train would begin its progress again; the track itself had not been damaged. He also made clear that taking air, however seemly the activity itself, would have to be restricted to the times he could offer company. The amount of his own blood that he wore seemed to offer more coverage than the ever-present suit, which had, but for the stains, seemingly come off with less damage than Vincent's skin.

The offer of his services as polite escort had a fit of laughter, too close to hysteria for Lucrecia's own comfort, heave its way out of her mouth and into the air.

Vincent swallowed another pill. He drank a glass of water which sat yet undisturbed on the spread of playing cards of Gast and Hojo's prior recreation. He announced also the death of one of their guards; he did not foresee that the loss would impede them too greatly over the next two weeks. They would have offered healing, had any of them been proficient with such a thing. As it was, Lucrecia thought only to offer the water Vincent had already claimed; Gast to offer a paternal praise which would have fallen awkwardly on ears that did not need it; and Hojo an apology he had already dismissed as without value prior to its issue.

Not unexpectedly, it was Ifalna who dared the conventional silence with an offer appropriate, if somewhat motivated, as they all were, by self-interest. 

'Thank you, Mr Valentine.' 

'My job,' said he, either as explanation or as a lead-in to a complaint which was not broached.

Ifalna laughed with an enviable naturalness; she babbled in a tone that set Lucrecia's teeth on edge. 'It's really not like me to get so hysterical. I have to apologise. I hope I didn't embarrass myself by shrieking for my mother, or-or, I don't know, vowing eternal love or something silly like that - but gosh, Mr Valentine, the sight of that bird, it was revolting, wasn't it? I've been in Midgar for such a long time, I hadn't realized how wrong all the monsters out here looked.'

Vincent smiled. At the corner of his mouth, the bloody mask cracked. 'A long standing battlefield rule, Ifalna: no man's to be held by anything he says in the heat of the moment. I can certainly extend the rule to you.'

'An honorary man,' Hojo said, 'you do know how to comfort a lady, don't you, Valentine?' to which Gast harrumphed a laugh not quite by that name.

Lucrecia was conscious only that she had no mention as coming under that battlefield exemption. 

Her safety felt assured for as long as Vincent did not look at her - but as though her very wish for solitude had been a scream for contact Vincent turned, and Vincent looked at her. 

Her misery, stabbed between her shoulders hard enough to make her hunch, could not have been sharper.

'Ms Crescent,' Vincent said. His pupils were too small for the relative dimness of their cabin, needle-sharp; he continued looking at or into her. 'You must have been one of my father's students.'

A contradictory relief that Vincent did not ask her to clarify, but rather leapt to his own conclusion: Lucrecia sighed, for if she had had to justify her statement, she could not have found the courage.

As it was, she only nodded.

Vincent inhaled deeply. An odd expression crossed his face, which Lucrecia belatedly realized was pain leaking through the barrier built of medication.

'How is the old bastard? I haven't seen him in - forever. Forever and a day.'

Vincent could have been forgiven his strained tone for the matter of his exhaustion, the bloodiness upon his cheek; the words approximated normality, the circumstance never. 

'I -I'm so sorry.' Lucrecia licked her lips wet, her heart suddenly a-beat with eagerness. She cursed herself: she had no courage. 'You-no one told you what-happened?'

Vincent blinked.

Hojo snapped his fingers, sharp in the silence. 'Valentine. Grimoire Valentine.'

'Old Grim was your father?' Gast seemed startled. 'Why, lad. That practically makes us all family! You were well-chosen for this mission indeed! We're all so very glad to have you hear.' He murmured again, as though enjoying the shape of the words, 'Practically family.'

Resisting the moan of protest Lucrecia could feel rising in her throat, she regurgitated instead words that she had overchewed, for years: 

'I'm so terribly sorry for what happened, Mr Valentine. This is no solace, but at the end, your father passed away at peace, and with his thoughts on you.'

Lucrecia determined he could not guess her lie: Vincent was drugged to the gills, and in pain.

Yet, oddly enough, Vincent now acted more human under the influence than he had through any of his interactions with them so far: Vincent seemed struck, as if by one of his own returning bullets. He choked.

His humanity was so evident that even Hojo clicked his tongue, while Gast expounded, 'My boy, my dear boy,' and poured a stiff scotch to replace the water.

With Gast's hand on his shoulder, recipient of both their pity and a sudden masculine solidarity Lucrecia had never expected, blood still grimed deep under the edge of his fingernails, Vincent drank that neat scotch, exhaled, and set the empty glass upon the table.


	8. Chapter 8

Two folios shared space, side by side on the vastness of President Shinra's desk.

Though Shinra did not yet know it, the second folio contained the answer to the first. 

Shinra read the first folio with an increasing rage. It was a compilation from the Department of Administrative Research, titled "Reports Documenting the Reactions of Midgar's (Greater) Population to the Monstrous Massacre at Gongaga." 

He showed none of his anger on his face, broad and sweating, nor in twitches, stance or surrender. He was ever aware of the two Turks who kept his presence at all times, city spies, administrative researchers, guardians of the establishment. They pained him, these Turks. They had been so useful to begin with, believers in rightful governance; it was to Shinra's growing despair that they believed more in the rightfulness of governance than the right of the governer. He was no despot to contradict them, but day by day their advice came peppered with the full weight of cannonfire, as though rule by committee could ever achieve what Shinra had wrought of his own, singular spine. He did not know what had happened. Of the Young Turks, those associates of his youth, a second generation of public servants had evolved, having lived only and ever under the shadow of Midgar's plate; their loyalties were to the city, not to the man.

Shinra read through his rage:

_To the President._

_Regarding the Gongaga incident, the public has been willing to accept the comparison between this inglorious episode and our earlier, triumphant struggle for Midgar's unification, notably as presented in the speech of the resident Shinra Marshal (Heidegger, field promotion, see footnotes for relevant recommendation). The push for globalization is accepted as a necessity against the inglory of a world increasingly hostile to our presence. However, the fact remains that Midgar's offer of 'rescue' to the citizens of Gongaga will result in the influx of some 47000 wounded and 50000 sound-of-body, all 97000 suffering considerable trauma of mind, into the subcity sectors. Despite our own losses during the Gongaga incident, it is vital to inform the press that the majority mass of these Gongaga immigrants will not respond well to the employment of such emotional sentiments as "heroism", "valor", "sacrifice and martyrdom". Such terminology will be regarded as emphasis of their defeat, to rekindle only reminders of the monstrous invasion which necessitated their call for Midgar's assistance. Furthermore, large segments of Midgar's native population have been noted as publicly debating whether Midgar's involvement in world development is inevitable and whether the resultant immense sacrifices are necessary. Our fellow citizens are specifically concerned with the question of whether the threat to Gongaga was at the time promptly recognized. Air reconnaissance should have spotted the vast concentration of monstrous activity then moving against Gongaga. The controlled leaking of reports to the media regarding the apparent 'appearance' of the monstrous presence central to the city itself have worsened the matter, increasing uncertainty in the competence of Midgar's armed forced._

_The media has been informed to avoid use of the abovementioned terminology, the concept of "heroism" and "one land: a better land" having been emptied of meaning through prior overuse. With the vastness of this defeat frustrating all good sentiment, it is vital that the Shinra Administration avoid refuge in platitudes._

_The question today, it is said, is no longer how far away victory is, but how long Midgar can continue a war of unification while it also must fight against a world that itself seems to be revolting against our very presence._

The so-called reports had long since stopped taking the tone of informative memos. The Turks - his Turks - dictated to their dictator. 

Shinra was not stupid: he recognised the true misfortune here was that he had trusted the Turks too wholly. He had trusted them to remove all trace of his authority as anything but a man. The mayors of old had claimed their right to rule through a public vote - but Shinra had trusted his Turks when they said the voices of the uneducated were flawed. The kings and city-princes who had ruled before the mayors once claimed their right to rule as a divine law, descendents from the Cetra themselves - but Shinra had trusted his Turks when they said the outmoded religion could only disqualify Shinra himself from a lawful dominion. Shinra knew the Turks had marketed him as a force for change too thoroughly, they could not oust him, not and retain Midgar's position as the centre of the world. But they wanted to puppet him.

All Shinra needed was autonomy. His administration ruled him now by right of numbers. Shinra needed a source of power all his own. Shinra cleared his throat and closed the first folio. Behind him, one of the Turks shifted his weight from foot to foot, fabric rustling. 

The second folio contained a diffidently written proposal from one Professor Gast Faremis, requesting funding for the research of an unlikely Cetran relic.


	9. Chapter 9

'Please,' the President said, as though the word was not at all unfamiliar on his lips. 

He indicated the glass of scotch which sat before Gast on an otherwise unpopulated desk. The liquid rippled without any definite cause for its unease; it quivered, Gast decided, as though afraid of its inevitable consumption. Gast was filled with the irrational terror that everything that touched Shinra's desk would invariably be consumed. His palms sweated at the thought that he might inadvertantly touch that polished wood.

'Do be at ease.' The President again indicated the glass of scotch, as though only consumption of high quality scotch could signal a man's ease in Shinra's mighty presence. Fat enough to require the oversized magnificence of the chair that backed him, Shinra nevertheless moved with a curt kind of fitness, every motion precisely considered for minimal effort and maximal gain. The very wave of his hand, magnanimous and encompassing Gast, the glass, and the clear territories of his desk, could not have told a clearer story in words. 

At Shinra's desk, empires must devour their own weight in strength and surety, or be swallowed whole themselves.

Gast did not drink at home, his sister disliked the smell. He took the quivering glass and called it courage.

Shinra smiled, just enough that the round of his cheeks lifted and his lips did not quite curve. In Shinra's own youth, before the company had become a way of life, before Midgar, before even the Consolidation, Shinra had come from a sector of the countryside where horizontal lines across a man's brow were indicative of wisdom, confidence, honour. Shinra's abundance gave him the false glow of youth; his brow was unlined with any form of worry.

'I always like a scotch at the end of the day,' Shinra announced, 'don't you? It eases the stomach, clears the throat of the day's unpleasant business before a man can talk with a friend. Ahah! Brisk, that blend, isn't it?'

Gast swallowed desperately his second round of choking, and fought free at last to speak, only to find Shinra had already moved on without him, this time to cigars. Gast detested smoking. Cigar smoke in this small room would be somewhat like fogging for ghosts instead of insects; the ghosts of unpleasant political disagreements past. 

Had Gast spoken his latter thought, he would have been surprised to find Shinra approving of the idea that cigar smoke could offer business a benediction comparable to holier incense. Shinra understood symbols, and liked them. He had spent his life to date redefining old myths, shaping them in his own image. He despised the romanticism of the old world he had grown of age in; he had fought half his life against those austere rituals of balance and the meaning held within. For Shinra, balance implied limits. Balance suggested that humanity was constrained, and Shinra could not abide by the thought that he and his humanity could ever be limited. His very obesity told the tale of his belief: Shinra did not abide by abstinence, limits nor control. In Shinra's dream world, hunger did not exist, nor poverty: a person would be allowed to eat what he wanted, when he wanted, and however much he wanted, for there would always be more. Shinra's dream world was a land of more than plenty -- it was a land of always more. Born into a childhood of subsistence starvation, suffering the frugality of a world where there was barely enough, Shinra believed in more.

But not all people likewise believed. Shinra assumed the responsibility of one who was large enough to see the distant horizon, to point at it, and to lead the way. Shinra thought in horizons to conquer, and in systems that would allow the conquering. He acknowledged that one man alone could never reach the sky -- but one man standing on the backs of one hundred others, yes, and by building such a human pyramid, what would that topmost man do but uplift the lowest common denominator of people everywhere? Shinra dreamed a world of magnificence; Shinra would reach the moon, or his men would; Shinra would span the earth from pole to pole; Shinra would unify, discover, create; Shinra would provide it all, and provide that elusive always more. 

Shinra dreamed a grand dream, but he dreamed in micro-steps, of hierarchy and administration and progress. This was his success. 

And because of this, Shinra had short shrift for fools who foiled process, who acted independently, who believed in heroism. He thought Gast was a fool, but Shinra was uneasy with first impressions. He had not reached the heights he had by resting on his assumptions. The Turks could find nothing of Gast that added weight to his motivations with regards to the Cetran discovery; the man had no vices, only interests, no desperate need to prove himself by conquering old mountains. Gast appeared to be a genuine mortal being who wished only to do a job which, it seemed, he genuinely enjoyed. And so, uneasy yet patronising, Shinra poured scotch and offered cigars. Both were symbols of his own creation, markers of excess that labeled him a pleasure-driven fool, but a rich one, with always more money to burn.

'So,' said the President, still in tones of an obnoxious joviality, 'when did you know what it was you unearthed?'

Gast blinked too fast. Curling smoke made his eyes prickle as though threatening to water. He shook his head. 'Mr President. It is never a matter of 'moments'. There have been so many myths that reference the Icicle region, a star from the sky, a winged angel of great power and beauty that would sleep forever in the ice, yet how many corpses have been unearthed, mammoths, fragments of dinosaur bone, uncertain human remains...when did I know?' 

Emboldened by the President's attentive silence, the masculine appendage between his own two forefingers, and a gut full of gulped courage, Gast continued: 

'Not when I unearthed it, for sure, though perhaps then I suspected - but even there my hesitance was methodogy. The ice had preserved it -- the ice had preserve the Cetra, but not kindly. I could not risk further excavation without appropriate facilities. I garnered what samples I could. Even then, I did not know. I could have held in my hands only the dumb flesh of a ravaged whale corpse, at best the shattered bioform of yet another WEAPON. All I knew was that what I had unearthed was no human remnant, no ancestral source. The shape, you see - it was --' Gast wanted to say "repellent", but he could not bring himself to form the word. 'It was alien,' he admitted. 'Unpleasant, by human standards.'

Shinra himself had no objection to unpleasantness, and his girth told the tale of his lack of respect for human standards. Shinra understood in extreme emotion there was always the flipside presence. Gast's voice held more fascination than repellence. 

'Once back at the lab,' Shinra prompted. 

There were two Turks in the room, well practiced at being ignored. Gast imagined his cup filled continuously by some miraculous means, for as he spoke he drained it in rounds. Shinra clenched his teeth around his cigar and waited.

'No,' Gast mused, with an air of conspiracy that Shinra smirked at inwardly, 'not even back in my lab did I know for sure. Laboratory tests take time, and I am not - theological anthropology has never been a department prioritized in the queue. Perhaps I had some inkling that I'd found something unusual when the expected six week wait became twelve. When excuse after excuse kept coming. When at last, an apology came, and a request for my presence - I suspected, at least. They could not determine the terrestrial origins of the thing. Seemingly, it was not possible to carbon date an object lacking in carbon.'

Gast waiting, smiling, as though expecting Shinra to misunderstand. The President instead challenged: 'I did think carbon dating could date from the carbon surrounding a sample, if not the sample itself-'

'You forget the impact of surrounding Lifestream - ah, mako - Mr President. Seemingly I had taken too pure a sample. There was nothing in my swabs but for the specimen itself, clean and clear. Pure, as though all other forms of life had been swept away beyond even burning.'

'And what are the odds of that,' the President mused, in conscious mockery of Gast's contemplative mode.

Gast failed to observe. 'And perhaps I suspected then, Mr President, that I had at last discovered my life's crowning achievement. But it was unknown even to myself! Only as though obstacles were thrown in my way: an incompetant department, time concerns, lack of funding for rigorous tests or the allocation of a biotechnologist...General U set their best technician to run the final analyses. The results filtered back to me in such small amounts I could not even then determine a point where I knew I had discovered the first Cetra...or the Last Cetra, if you will.'

'The last one left behind,' Shinra said. 'As though to turn off the lights after all the others ascended to the Promised Land.'

Encouraged, Gast accelerated. 'First the date was confirmed. The creature was aeons older than even I could ever have expected it - and consider, too, how low the tides of the Lifestream must have fallen for this being to be unearthed again! Then the behaviour of the sample itself, under the scope, was unlike any other mortal being we found. For you see, President, the cells -' a hesitation, unhappily, 'were immortal.'

'I should have thought you would have known then you'd found a Cetra.'

'Ah, but what could I think but that it was another mistake? A human error in the laboratory, a misreading of the graphs. I say to you now: Mr President, this being is the corpse of an Immortal Cetra, but that definition is one defined by summary. I tell this tale in retrospect. The conclusion was presented to me a series of graphs, charts, summary, and I simply did not know-'

'Professor,' the President said, 'are you certain now?'

'Why, yes. The being is a Cetra.' A cough. 'There is no other explanation, is there?'

'You are certain,' the President emphasized. 

Eyes sliding from Shinra's shining stare, Gast said: 'As certain as anything is in this world.'

'I cannot have uncertainty,' Shinra announced. 'The people do not want uncertainty, Professor. We live in a time of crisis, of unexplained attacks and the growing threat of monsters -- whose numbers even now must be more than twenty for every man alive. War: the people could understand that, and have sanctioned many of Midgar's benign conquests -- but this monstrous threat is a threat of massacre! Consider too our growing inability to farm for lack of safety! Death will come by famine, if not by outright monstrous ravage.'

'But your army-'

'Has proven only partly a success.' 

Shinra sighed. At once, all his size and magnificence seemed to deflate, to leave behind only a man too old for these burdens, too desperate. Gast found himself flooded with pity instead of courage; he sipped his scotch. 

'It was only with great regret that I allowed the army to be formed, Professor. Twenty years on the structure has proven still futile against the growing monstrous rampage; I cannot rightly keep the monstrous threat silenced, though I cannot allow, either, panic to sweep the population. I am their father, their guide, the one who must face the threat without quailing that all may live without fear. But my people are not stupid, professor. They know. There are questions, and I must have answers. I must have certainty! Are you certain, Professor?'

Confronted with Shinra's sudden revelation that Gast would be a part, somehow, of the correction of the world's unbalanced situation, Gast sputtered: 'You think - how will a Cetra help-!'

'Old mythology,' Shinra rumbled, regretful. 'I have deliberately turned my face away from old myths. I have accepted the advice of others that old mythology gave us nothing but fragments, outmoded beliefs, rituals sourced in nothing more than pure evolutionary coincidence. But the Cetra are a thread through all the tales, Professor. The angels. The watchmen. The guardians of the earth and of the earth's balance. The winged Cetra, powerful enough to create the WEAPONs to safeguard the world's balance. But where did the Cetra go, Professor? Why did they leave us? Why do the WEAPONs still sleep, when Shinra could use them? Did they all return to the stars from which the legends say they came in such a gout of great glorious fire? And in this time of crisis, why will the Cetra, or their trusted servitors the WEAPONs, why will they not return to help us? Slolwy, surely, wearingly, the monsters are removing all aspects of civilization we have fought so hard to establish. They have infested our mines, they erode the tracks of the trains, desecrate our fields -- and our armies do not breed as fast as the monsters do. Every one of our men is cherished, and lost. The people cry out for guardianship, and where I cannot provide, I must look to the stories that say, once upon a time, the Cetra protected us all.'

Shinra breathed, shook his head, and continued.

'And the mako, professor. The Lifestream. Have you noted the drop in level?'

Gast stuttered. 'It permitted me to discover the Cetra. The levels were low...we have not yet found a safe method for exploration of mass quanities of lifestream...'

'The Lifestream is low,' Shinra said, 'in the way blood bursts from a fresh wound but ebbs, surely as the blood itself runs out: the researchers have confirmed it. The Lifestream is limited. But all is not lost.'

Presented with apocalypse when all he had come for was funding, Gast struggled to follow Shinra's sudden positive leap.

'The Lifestream level drops,' Shinra said, beaming, 'and you discover a Cetra! Is this coincidence? I will not believe in coincidence: the world offers opportunities to those who would take it. Who can say that the Cetra did not preserve their last specimen in exactly this location, so we would only discover it at the peak of our desperation?'

'Well,' Gast said, 'I couldn't say it, but couldn't say it otherwise, Mr President.'

'Professor, I need answers. I need certainty to save our way of life. The Cetra promised us a land of plenty, of endless sustenance against the black void of space; eternal life for us all. I have scorned old myth only to turn now, in my time of crisis, towards it. A Cetra, Professor. You have unearthed the answer, for we can rekindle the trust legendary between our angelic guardians and ourselves. We can reclaim our rightful place in that Promised Land, wherever it may be. Certainty, Professor - you offer us certainty, comfort, safety. You will lead the way into a better world.'

At that, Gast at last ignited. 

Perhaps it was the years of unacknowledged labour. Certaintly it was the scotch, at best a flammable liquid. Gast had never worked for money, though he did indeed need money to work; what truly set his imagination on fire was Shinra's promise of acknowledgement. Nothing more than that. Shinra himself was an incendiary type, his dreams forever demanding fuel. He recognised the sudden change in Gast's eyes, Gast's stance. Shinra had won himself the loyal ally he sought, loyal to him and to humanity.

One of the Turks coughed. 

Even inspired, Gast had spent too long working with vaguaries to enjoy them. 'I don't know,' he said, 'the Cetra is dead, Mr President, what form of intercession had you been imagining?'

'I did think you said it was immortal.'

'Well, immortality, Mr President, is not necessarily the immortality of fables. Yes, each cell of this Cetra is immortal -- practically independent of each other, able to survive fire, vacuum, any force we could apply. But as a whole, thinking being, the Cetra - by human terms - is dead.'

Shinra folded fat fingers together and rested his chin on his hands. He thought.

'Professor, you mentioned before only understanding your own knowledge in hindsight. But you must think forward, my friend, you must think forward! You must anticipate yourself. You must not think the way a scientist does or a man does, where change occurs and he but a part of the process. You are thinking of yourself as a passenger in this life, not the driver. No, my friend, no, understand that all of human progress has been driven by individuals, and you are now one of those drivers. Look on the Cetra with the eyes of a visionary. Think forward, even sitting here now opposite me, two friends chatting, so that you may look on this very moment as though possessed of hindsight. This is the moment, Professor. This is the moment in which you will change the world for the better. And what is death, I say, for an immortal being?'

Shinra laughed to offset the mood. 

His laugh was high, slightly girlish, and rendered him human. Shinra was no grand symbol of conquest, only a man. Gast's friend, who acknowledged him. 

'And how will history look at us,' Shinra chortled, fit to have Gast grin too, 'two men too old for this excitement, nursing their scotch and cigars.'

'To practicalities,' Shinra said, 'Of course you must have your requested funding. Your team, unfortunately, we will have to keep so very small. There are those unfortunates who would regard any attempt at study of this magnificent being to be an atrocity. There are always those who deliberately misinterpret even the straightest of facts, terrorists and the like, so even within my own cohort this will be kept small. You must give me your ideal team, multitaskers all, versatile, adaptable, the minimum staff you would require.'

'But...what will I doing? As my proposal states, I needed only one assistant and a geneticist, and we can document the Cetra with just two--'

'But you cannot resurrect a Cetra and save a nation with only two. I have read your intial proposal for funding, my friend, and you shortchange yourself and your capabilities. You requested funding only for the documentation of a unique gene structure. I want, Professor, I want more. I want answers out of that coding. And for answers you will need a staff that asks questions.'

'Mr President,' Gast agreed, 'you are right.'

Gast was buoyed by Shinra's certainty for the length of the Turk-chauffered drive back to his sister's residence. He remained buoyed through the re-drafting of his proposal, his sister's tireless feedback a background whine. Shinra had a lasting presence: the impact of his gravity did not fade until two days later, when Gast was awakened before dawn by two Turks, and given instructions to pack his bags.

Bereft of Shinra's vast presence, that pull of certainty, Gast found his own belief but the skim on the surface of an endlessly deep doubt.


	10. Chapter 10

In an office typified by a functional normality so monitored as to make the slightly askew rack of large books of law to one side appear a prop thieved from a stage, two Turks sat opposite each other at a desk far less expansive than their President's. One man was young, one old. One yet wore his navy blazer; the other had his pale blue shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow.

Both men were reading a copy of Gast's proposal. One sucked on his red ink pen, having exhausted what further details he could pull from the document. The other read with only half a mind, considering still the other document of his perusal this evening, namely Shinra's orders for the morning of tomorrow.

'I don't like it,' said the first Turk. 

The other, who was characterized by his fellows as slow, simply for his urge to question extensively before concluding, cleared his throat. 'You think the Cetra is real? This Gast could have faked it.'

'We're damned if it is real,' the first said, 'and, as Shinra pointed out, bloody well damned if it isn't.'

'The Ancients are a myth,' said the second. He cleared his throat again. 'Not that I'm saying that, mind, just that that's what's been said.'

'Yeah, but, think about it this way: in one thousand years, Shinra's going to be lucky if he's a myth.'

There was enough of an implicit threat in that statement that both fell uncommonly silent.

'Still,' said the second, intending amelioration, only to be interrupted.

'It wouldn't be the first time Shinra's gone off and done something whacked without our consensus.'

The second chose to find this irony amusing. 'Who would've thought our revolutionary spearhead had a brain?'

'He's desperate,' said the first Turk, who believed neither in Shinra, old gods, nor the motivational value of desperation. 'For all he wants to be the usher of a new era, he can't let go of the old ways. He won't let go of the imagery. Shinra believes in old gods and monsters, in heroes and saviors; he's believed in them all his life, believed in them enough that they disappointed him enough for him to want - to need to rebuild a world that has no room for them. Then this.' An exclamation, full of a grim pleasure, as though glad to see his President's foundations rocked: 'Then this! Hello, Cetra, welcome back!'

'So if this is an Ancient, then what do we believe in, sir?'

'Gods and monsters are all well and good, as long as they're ones we've made. New gods, new monsters, and all of them are ours. That's the whole point, of all this - of all the sacrifices. This world is ours, we're not victims here, we're not debris left behind by some god-shaped Cetran evacuation: if all the myths are true, where's our worth? The Cetra went to their Promised Land and left us behind, some guardians, some uplifting angels; were we judged, and did we fail? No. No. Myths and legends. The - the corpse this Gast's uncovered is proof of that. The Cetra have left behind nothing of themselves but myths and legends. This thing, if it is a Cetra, just proves they were as mortal as we were, and they all died.'

The second had allowed himself some distraction mid-way through his superior's tangent, knowing, from the old days, the course of the argument. He said, musing, 'But if this find really is an Ancient, what if it is the key? There's the WEAPONs that we still can't control - imagine what we could do to Wutai if we could get the key to the WEAPONs. And then the critical issue. The Cetra promised us their Promised Land, eternal abundance. Providence against the void of space. Shinra's whitecoats say mako has a hundred, maybe 150 years left of use at our current rate of consumption. Outside of Shinra's lifetime of caring-'

'Fuck that. We believe in a world that's going to last longer than any of our lifetimes.' The first nodded. 'The people, brother. For a better world. Shinra's lifetime is meaningless to what we endeavor to create.'

'The people,' agreed the second, though withheld the 'brother', out of mild uncertainty as to whether his superior was currently in need of a comrade's support or an underling's unequivocal agreement. 'So if it is a Cetra-'

'We let Shinra have his pet project,' said the first, brow furrowed with thought. 'We need to assign an operative to keep it all under control. If this thing turns out to be a Cetra - well. Manmade gods to fight manmade monsters, the way I see it. We might get something out of the corpse. If not, then we stand back and just let Shinra unbalance himself publically with the godworship he's worked hard to eradicate, right to the point of no recovery - and then, we have sufficient proof to take steps on behalf of the people of Midgar.'

The second coughed.

'Suggestions for the rank and file?'

'Gast's already sent his wishlist to Shinra, sir. They've all screened well enough: two Shinra scholarship students, a fair few years into their careers. Several lab assistants with slightly dubious origins; we might have to limit those, and only one candidate looks promising for a project that might have to be...buried; unmarried, orphaned, and that. There'll be two women, two men, as little family and connection as possible. Ideal working conditions. I suggest we send Valentine.'

'He's a sniper, no face skills whatsoever. Why him?'

The second hesitated. Compassion as motivation was not frowned on in the Turks: they did, after all, profess a care for the people that most governments lacked. 'He submitted his resignation this morning, sir.'

The first frowned, in likelihood, uncertain of why this evident instability made Valentine an optimal candidate. 'When?'

'Actually, right on the lift, while I was on my way up here.'

'That suggests instability at the worst. At the very least, angst.'

'That suggests,' said the second, 'that our brother Vincent is getting a little frustrated with our continued abuse of one set of his skills, and that he's too intelligent to overlook this as abuse, and that he, more than any other of our operatives I can think of, would appreciate the opportunity to direct a project like this. For all his training, sire, he has never had face time.'

The first considered this. 'He's been with us since the Consolidation. And you say he's only ever had target-and-kill?'

'He has. Not a Young Turk, but not a newcomer either. He's had no involvement in media or propaganda; he's unbiased, sir. If this is a Cetra, he'll report it honestly. Faithfully. If it isn't, he'll report that too. His own opinion won't sway what he sees.' 

The second Turk spoke with a certainty of voice and manner that would very soon site him in the role of his now-supervisor, youth notwithstanding. What he did not repeat was what Vincent had said on that uncomfortably long lift ride.

Vincent had said this:

_'We're put in this world for a reason, sir, I believe that. We're here -- to do something. To change the world, it's what we do as Turks, and as people, we change things. If it's not going just be change for the sake of it - if it's not going to be arbitrary change, sir, then it has to be change for the better. But what have I done with my life? Do you know how many men I've killed? What good's a dead man to anyone? I want a chance -'_

_'To change the world for the better?' said the second Turk, who had suffered precisely then the compassionate realization that, courtesy of a few shared years, drinks, whores and complaints in no particular order, that he was the closest thing to a friend Valentine had._

_'I think I could be happy,' Vincent said, quietly, 'if I just had a chance to change. Whether I took it or not wouldn't matter so much. People ignore opportunities all the time. Don't go to school. Don't take that job. Don't marry that woman, or do, or risk rejection or acceptance or just _risk_. But I've never had the chance, I just want to have the chance, like everyone else...'_

_'You could always decide not to pull the trigger,' said the second Turk._

_He realized that was precisely the wrong thing to say._

_Vincent looked at his resignation letter, still held in his own hand, unaccepted. He did not show emotion easily, but his voice told the strain of shock._

_'And defy my orders, sir? No. No. I couldn't do that. I just want different orders, and they never come.'_

'I'll think about Valentine.' The first Turk narrowed his eyes. 'Organise an incident for somewhere between here and Corel, something that'll let Vincent integrate a bit better. We need trust between the whitecoats and our boy, if he's going to have to act as an inside operative.'

'Playing the hero, sir? A Turk? Saving the team from some vile attack against freedoms and rights?' This made the second Turk bitter, but he said it anyway: 'No one would believe it.'

'If Shinra can use the imagery, why can't we?'

'Vincent's not very heroic, sir. Capable, but not heroic.' He, who had witnessed the man's inhuman focus, neglected to add: terrifying, maybe.

'All the better. Everyone loves an underdog.'

The second Turk complied. He decided also that he would not inform Vincent of any impending attack; capable yes, but Valentine was no actor.


	11. Chapter 11

The approved poster featured a Shinra guard clad in his new patented blue uniform design, standing to the lower left corner of the page. He held a buster sword, called so for the brutally resistant quality of its steel to any damage - though it wasn't technically steel. The metal was a new amalgam that developed apace with the new monsters, many of whom were protected by a hide far tougher than the animal of their origin. The guard did not carry at his belt a gun, as the standard uniform decreed, only the monster-slaying sword. 

The guard stood with his legs akimbo, his sword held high, and his elbows outward; sword, elbows and boots, he formed a bright blue star. His shape was outlined with a neon glow, neon being associated with a particularly Shinra-shaped heroism. 

Central to the poster were a huddled cluster of hapless citizens in grey. The guard was clearly about to defend them from an imminent attack from the opposite side of the page. 

On the opposing side of the page, small, dark, and terrifyingly devoid of any neon glow or heroic stance, was a monster. The similarity to a household dog, now forbidden in the city, would have been the most terrifying thing about that monster, had the artist not been issued a request by the Department of Administrative Research to ensure the monster looked more monsterish, perhaps with the addition of some spikes. The monster wore spikes, and its teeth were bloody razors.

At the bottom of the page, in a font that was only permitted to be used on official Shinra publications, was the explanation:  
 _A SOLDIER OF SHINRA  
He does not carry his sword to put fear into you. It is to take fear out of his own heart.  
Citizens of Midgar, be not afraid._

The soldier also wore a blue mask, eyes obscured, only his mouth showing. The addition of a mask to the standard uniform was a calculated decision, not entirely motivated by the blinding, confusing, wretched miasma associated with many of the monsters. There were to be no heroes in Shinra's private army: the uniform was an equalizer. Here are your sons, Shinra said, and delivered back to the citizens of Midgar a faceless multitude of men who became human again only after hours, and on weekends. How could a frustrated citizen of Midgar ever strike at a solider, not knowing if it was their once-love, their next-door-neighbour's only boy, or their very own brother?

This was far before the time of the mako inoculations. After that, the masks served an additional purpose of concealing the unnatural neon of an affected pair of eyes.

Vincent Valentine arrived in Midgar a child exactly as old as the city itself. Consolidation was one full year into civil riots, and blue uniformed men held the fledging city together with guns, not swords. The most common form of political graffiti involved the conversion of our non-heroic soldier's buster sword into an automatic gun, made of thick black lines. Midgar's citizens knew never to trust a man with a gun. (It was this, more than anything, that limited the eventual SOLDIER's designation to include only swords, as Shinra had first envisaged his army wielding, not people-killing projectiles.)

The second most common form of political graffiti involved the removal of the upper left hand corner of the poster. Without the presence of the threatening monster, it appeared as though the glowing soldier was about to swing his sword downwards onto the huddled grey mass of terrified civilians crouched before him, all of whom were turning their faces away to look at a monster no longer there.

On one of Vincent's many attempts to flee the city, motivated by a rage born out of his inability to stop the gunfire that rattled through the tenements of his daily life, Vincent ripped one of the posters from a wall clad with fifty of them, all with various states of graphic commentary scrawled across the original intent. Vincent ripped as high as he could reach.

A young man in a blue suit, interested in how carefully the boy chose to strip only the gun-graffiti posters, and how he left intact all those with the pure form of Shinra's message. With interest as his primary motivation, the young Turk stopped Vincent with one hand on his shoulder.

'Swords and guns,' Vincent babbled; he was not weeping, but there was blood on his face. In the distance, another internal conflict rocked the overcrowded district where he lived, gunfire signalling the arrival of Shinra's grunts. Vincent flinched. 'But guns do nothing to the monsters! Six, seven, ten shots, but their hearts aren't where they should be, their bones are stronger than bullets, guns do nothing to them, I know, I've seen it. But all I see here are guns, guns, guns. The monsters are all out there, not in here, and Levi weeps for us!'

The young man in the blue suit cocked his head at that last ejaculation. Tribal gods were not in vogue amonst Midgar's native-born; the young man listened to the thick foreign lilt on Vincent's tongue, and correctly deduced the boy was a recent immigrant, who would have traveled to Midgar's oasis across a land crawling with monsters. Shinra's poster-bound promise of safety meant more to the boy than it did to any of Midgar's native-born civilians. Gently, the young man in the blue suit told Vincent there were more than one kind of monster, that not all monsters looked like monsters; and that no one's heart was ever where anyone else expected it to be.

'Guns are useless,' Vincent insisted. 'Fifty of us survived to try to come here, and there were only seven of them, and nearly all of us died. We had guns! We might as well have thrown flowers.'

By this stage the young man in the blue suit had calmed Vincent down enough to talk him into a stall by the side of the road, where the bluecoat bought Vincent a bowl of noodles and a fizzy drink coloured like a Costa del Sol sunset. Swords were currently the more effective weapon on monsters, the bluecoat agreed, but the thing with guns in cities was the potential for precision. 

'Guns are used on people,' Vincent said. By this stage he was unsure if he was agreeing with the young man in the blue suit, or trying to contradict him. 'Swords on monsters, guns on people. People don't need to die.'

'I hate guns,' Vincent also said. 'They're useless where they need to be.'

Many people hate things they fear, the young man told Vincent. He also told him that everything was useless, until someone came along who knew how to use a thing correctly. 

'I'm not afraid of guns,' Vincent said, 'I'm - angry. I hate guns. I don't understand why they -' he pointed at the posters he had removed, now slapping wetly against a bitumen left always damp by the condensation dripping from the plate overhead - 'aren't out there with their swords and the monsters, why do they have to be in here with their guns, and us?'

The young man said, everyone is afraid of things they don't understand.

'It's not right.' Vincent was sniveling again. 'The way things are right now. It's not right.'

It's not, agreed the bluecoat. 

On all of the posters, the text was left untouched. The majority of Midgar's inhabitants could not read, either through poverty or knowing primarily another language, so Shinra's slogans made no difference to them. To their children, it was a different matter. The posters made promises that the children, educated in Shinra-funded schools, heeded and took to their heart. Even when it meant they would have to argue meaning with their elders over a dinner made of means. The children would inherit a Midgar that was what their parents had made of it. The children were terrified of the fighting. The children did not understand, but Shinra, and all his paternal grandiosity and his brightly coloured posters, the majority drawn in the style of a child's comic book, offered peace. 

Six years later, civil riots suppressed, Grimoire Valentine enrolled in Shinra's top ranks of scientists, and Vincent mentored through one of the best schools Midgar could provide, the same bluecoat asked an adolescent Vincent, over a bowl of noodles that could have been near identical to the first, in a stall that was upgraded only by the presence now of the neon glow of a static-riven tv set that spoke Shinra's words instead of writing them, what he was going to do about things _not being right_.

Vincent, who had learned a lot more about his Turk friend since their first meeting, but not quite enough, and who had had enough of uncertainty, said in a voice almost without accent: 'What would you like me to do about it, sir?'


	12. Chapter 12

The first thing Vincent did on arrival was breathe Nibelheim deep. 

Vincent regarded the village with fresh eyes. It was as though his story-telling of Nibelheim, prompted by that unfamiliar urge to comfort a woman who surely did not need it, had opened his eyes. Some buried self catalogued this Nibelheim for when Vincent's life could allow nostalgia. This project was his long-awaited allowance. He breathed, and allowed his footsteps to remain stark in the snow. He would not have to clear his tracks. The crackle of his cough echoed from the cold. Would he have laughed, had he been alone? 

Hojo skittered on the ice, cursing. His fall drew Lucrecia down beside him, Gast hastening to assist. With the twitch of a smile, Vincent was very glad he was not alone, forasmuch as he could be glad.

Compared to other communities, Shinra's presence hardly scarred Nibelheim. (Vincent disliked remembering the battle at Gongaga, and so he did not.) The inhabitants of the Nibel mountainside had a tenacity of purpose that Vincent considered instilled by the presence of that very mountain range. When something so vast, permanent, indefatigable loomed, there was something to be said about a breed of people who chose to persist. They built the ceilings of their houses extra low, as though in deliberate contrast to the overwhelmingly tall mountains; they painted their doors and windowframes in colours that an alpine landscape would never otherwise see. They built in wood, as though the impermanence of that very material gave their town a distinctness against the mountain's unyielding stone. When Shinra had arrived, in the form of one assassin, one dead mayor, and the reactor at Mt Nibel, the people of Nibelheim had converted their native industry to the production and management of that reactor without hiccup, and without a loss of income. Nibelheim's currency was the gil; whatever they had used before, Vincent did not know. 

Vincent had some vague plan for an induction; process, and procedure, a refuge for a man who viewed society as a grand mystery to be endured. He was daunted by the Shinra-bought mansion itself, an architecture which provoked Ifalna's instant glee. Fleet, she escalated that central flight of stairs and promenaded down, the angle of her skull baring the vulnerable softness beneath her chin. Ifalna's file history documented her arrival in Midgar, a child as poor as Vincent had been. Very like she had not seen a stair as wastefully grand as this before. Shinra built his structures with a brutal functionality of form, and Midgar's aesthetics were stolen. 

That train of thought, one seemingly on a circle-loop these past days, led Vincent to the inevitable. He turned, and looked.

Lucrecia appeared stricken at the magnificence of their abode. 

The blood of Midgar's old guard flushed her native pallor, lips, cheeks, the tip of her nose. Lucrecia's file history documented her family's fall from grandeur, a manse and estate that prior to the Consolidation had been even more fanciful than Nibelheim's tenacious citizenry could concoct. Yet surely Lucrecia wasn't old enough to remember the house of her birth?

A smile, more a grimance, and Lucrecia was suddenly aware of Vincent's focus. She murmured in a tone he could not define, 'What is this supposed to be? Does Shinra expect us to fete the Cetra when we get it to appear?' And the final defence, as always, of her functionality: 'What sort of working condition is this?'

Vincent looked skyward. Lucrecia's voice seemed to shake dust from the ceiling, for the air was temporarily full of sparkling gold motes. The sun, Vincent thought, must have slipped out from behind a cloud. Less at ease than before, Ifalna continued to grace the stair. Hojo let his bag slump with a remark as to the value of their quarters against their weekly wage. 

Having no answer for Lucrecia, nor even a question, Vincent returned his gaze to the stair and ignored her.

'The laboratory-' Lucrecia said, sharply.

'-is in the smithery adjacent,' Vincent said. 'Where it was relatively easy to convert chimneys to fumehoods, and the like. This is merely your accommodation.'

'"Merely",' Hojo said, and laughed outright. 'Indeed.'

'Our accommodation,' Gast said, his inflection heavy on the first word. 'I presume you're one of us, boy?'

Vincent smoothed the grimace that momentarily overwhelmed him. He could not take exception to Gast's efforts to include him; his purpose in being there was to assimilate the knowledge of the scientists, and he surely could not do that from a sniper's distance. But this was insufferable. Gast would not pass Vincent over, for Gast had somehow developed the urge to parent the Project. His attempts at paternalism were redolent of Shinra's manner, with whom Vincent was intimately familiar, yet the comparison did not do of Gast kindly. The compliance of his team often resembled the sniping of a family, true, without the respect and responsiveness that Shinra could command. Where Vincent required decisiveness in his betters, Gast tended to approach with questions. Vincent could not trust the weak to have wisdom.

Gast likely did not realise himself faulty. Over the last days of the journey, Vincent tolerated the paternal motions by thinking of Gast as another unfortunate animal at the end of his scope. In such a way did Vincent navigate much of the socialisation necessary to his survival. Had it not been for this learned detachment, Vincent might have re-lived against his will the countless deaths that occurred at his hand, and the one that had not. 

Levi wept! -- and that cursed train of thought brought him back, again, to the station's terminus. He had nearly been decieved into thinking Lucrecia unworthy of his attention. 

'You want a Turk in your bed, Gast, just ask him outright.'

And that was Hojo, Vincent recognised. Hojo, of all, had been the most vocally disturbed at Gast's persistence enveloping of Vincent into the fold. Despite his attempts at refinement during his conversations with Lucrecia, Vincent noted Hojo made no attempt to restrain that insult from escaping him. 

Gast's vague optimism dissolved into the contemptuous expression he reserved for the Doctor. 'So dependable, Hojo, to provide obscenity where none is needed.'

Vincent had long since noted that Gast's company, unavoidable though it was, beset Hojo's eyelid at random with a small pulsing tic. 'Gentlemen,' Vincent added, a reminder of conduct more than an address, 'perhaps you'd benefit from confirming the laboratory meets your requirements?'

They agreed, as the only rational thing to do, and went directly to the laboratory. Their departure left Vincent alone with the two women.

Ifalna twinkled from the stair. 'Aren't going to help us with our bags, Mr Valentine?' 

The thought of chancing time spent alone but for Lucrecia Crescent's company did nothing more than have the hairs at Vincent's nape stand on end. 

'My apologies, but I will have to oversee the transfer of the c-c--' and Vincent stuttered; daily, it became harder to refer to the creature objectively, '--Jenova into the freezer next door.'

'The old coal store, I presume?'

From the sarcasm, it was clear Lucrecia was speaking simply to be heard, to not be the one left silenced. Vincent nodded, and added, in case his agreement was not enough, 'Yes.'

Ifalna looked strangely disappointed. 'That's some baggage you've got there, Vincent. I don't envy you.' To Lucrecia: 'Shall we to the upper and claim the better rooms?'

As always, when prompted to response by Ifalna's endless ease of confidence, Lucrecia complied. Arm in arm, they were walking away. 

Prompted by the sight of Lucrecia's back, hunched by his one-word refusal to give any more, Vincent called up after them, though he knew his plural ambiguously delivered: 'I'll see you at dinner?'

As Ifalna sallied a brave reply, Lucrecia looked back. 

At once, the sight of her ascending that stair, the sun gilding her hair, struck Vincent with some shimmering revelation yet beyond his ken; the downcast chin yet upcast eyes, mingled with the fear Vincent could acknowledge he felt at the thought of being alone with Lucrecia. She knew his secrets, his father and his origin. More than that: his fear was tied to being here, in Nibelheim, where the air hung heavy with anticipation, of snow, or storm, or somewhat; the knowledge of his allowance, here; _live, Vincent, as though you are one of them_. And then, that particular despondant slump to Lucrecia's shoulder, asymmetrical, had Vincent recognise in her a kindred sensibility he found so rarely. Vincent could not even acknowledge his revelation: but some buried self, nostalgic and mournful, recognised in Lucrecia that she, too, was locked in the same solitary confinement which separated him from humanity. Outside their cells, they witnessed others communicate with the fluency of human beings. He and she could parrot, their birdsong of the morning, their words came too late for meaning.

On the tail of revelation, Vincent trembled with the force of the sudden idea, that he could reclaim his secrets and his certainty if he re-cast Lucrecia in a light entirely his. 

'Without doubt,' Lucrecia said, 'I think you will.'

Disturbed by the intensity of his emotion, Vincent hastened outside.


	13. Chapter 13

Solitude was Vincent's usual mode of operation. Restoration of the familiar allowed Vincent to continue as he was, contented by his own performance, and unthreatened by the unexpected depths of his own nature.

Via his files and two sleepless days and nights laced with cocaine and the newest of mysteries, a mako-induced hasting, Vincent knew Nibelheim's names and faces. He avoided contact for now, running through the list as he made his way to the cable pit. Within sat the terminus of a tenuous umbilical to Shinra's dream city. Efficiently, Vincent routed a terminal connection to Arcnet at HQ. He distrusted the advent of network connections, and thus he knew more about them than many of his colleagues, if never quite enough. He returned to the mansion and entered from the rear, pausing at a terminal for only long enough to ensure his connection functioned. In his quarters, a servant's sleeping room adjacent to the kitchen, Vincent stripped. Across the hall, where the outdated bathroom was communal, he noted the fresh wetness of the tiled walls, the infirm towel rail, the trace of Lucrecia's perfume in the air. She had left the radiator on high, a sodden towel over the rails. 

Vincent unpacked his personal kit and showered. 

Standing at the basin, he considered his sparse product. His potion and adrenaline pills, dehydrated for convience and bulk-packing, were running low. He needed more speed. His comb had snapped during transit. He did not wear cologne customarily, but he was not here to hide; scent could not betray him. He could buy some, surely. 

Turning, he caught sight of himself, nude, in the narrow vertical strip of mirror to the right of the commode. He stepped in the pooled wetness from she who had showered before. So, Lucrecia had stood here, too, regarding herself with critical eyes.

Vincent allowed himself to indulge.

Lucrecia would not have the scars he had, the burn stripes and flecks across his forearms and hands. Shrapnel. Grenades. Bullet casings. The early, ineffective models of elemental materia, backlashed across his own skin. Bullet holes, puckered like obscene kisses; knife wounds, the curving smiles. Those were the acceptable scars, the ones that drew comment from those prostitutes with whom he associated frequently. Midgar's bravest callgirls did not mention the clawmarks across Vincent's shoulders, a childhood rending faded to purple shadow. 

Lucrecia would never have been left prey to a monstrous attack. Her family would have ensured that, even after the Consolidation. 

Here, as well as in the forgotten land of his birth, Vincent's paleness was unremarkable. In Midgar, he could have passed as native as Lucrecia, a lineage attached to the land long before Shinra had come along. In Nibelheim, Vincent could not hide the difference. His skin betrayed itself, thin to the extent that his lips and eyelids, stained with cold-shocked blood, appeared lustful or bruised. His hair, a modish crop, would mark him fresh from Midgar.

A banner more than a man, Vincent dressed himself in Shinra's blues.

Efficiently, speaking only to those who could concern him, Vincent introduced himself and the absent Project to the town. He engaged in an agreement with the inn's owner: he personally would take three meals a day for his household from her common cookpot. He hired a cleaner. He paid a certain attention to the kitchenhand at the inn, a robust-looking blonde. Vincent knew enough of her to flatter without excess emotion; if her employer clammed up, she would likely let him know if strangers came to town. Vincent did the same with the daughters of the traders who would ride up from the lowlands to swap produce, the woman who ran what was called a boarding house with seven of her 'daughters', and with the affectionate gent who governed the local hot springs with a strict gender-based segregation, both as a law and that gentleman's preference.

Not a stranger had come through Nibelheim for nine months prior to this date. That left only the uncertainly familiar; Vincent neither doubted nor suspected anyone's involvement with AVALANCHE. His best would involve his vigilance; his vigilance was the best there could be.

Towards afternoon, the mayor approached, seeking a gravity of belly to challenge Shinra's own. Vincent explained what the Project would involve in as much detail as he could. Laughing, the mayor declared it all too mysterious for her, and left Vincent with a ringing clap to his shoulder. The Shinra representatives dutifully acknowledged, Nibelheim went on its way, that town of well-experienced copers. 

Vincent collected his four surviving subordinates and set them to a roster. They would be stationed in the buildings surrounding the laboratory. It would be preferable if the scientists never saw the guards, as experience taught Midgar's citizens to distrust a man in blue. Moving Jenova proved somewhat fraught, the village's children poking curiously at the sweating transport. Whatever Jenova was, it did not like staying frozen. Vincent allowed the four grunts to do their work, pulleys and chains involved in the lifting of that heavy crate from its refrigeration. The children moaned in disappointment: crates like that these mountain children had seen many a time. Vincent distracted them by juggling snowballs. 

By then, the cold had made Vincent's lips purple, small webbed veins colonising his cheeks. He could feel it, not quite like pain, but a sensation strangely like sunburn. His skin grew tighter with every moment of exposure. With a flash, a vivid image that replaced, for a moment, reality, Vincent imagined himself splitting open at the seams, clawing himself free from that husk of cold-withered skin and a useless blue suit, the howling beast within unleashed, and thus entirely liberated. 

Six freezing balls such an easy lot to keep aloft, Vincent bit the corner of a numbed lip sufficient to bleed, and wondered if his wits were leaving him. 

Yet Vincent's association with reality was fleeting at best. Imagination had as much worth as the hallucinations that sometimes took him, six nights of sleep-suppressants and immobility any sniper's self-bought cage.

Vincent breathed the cold deep. 

Once Jenova's confining crate was safely re-homed, Vincent made a gift of his snowballs to the children who had remained to watch, each of whom treasured the offer as though they had not thrown snowballs at each other all their short lives.


	14. Chapter 14

In his role as project director, Gast directed the Project's initial establishment, setting the tasks and outlining the outcomes. The mansion's dining room table would become the official site of full debriefing, a room Vincent referred to, if only within the bounds of his own skull, as HQ. In HQ, then, with Gast at the table's head, two scientists and one assistant arrayed in a configuration which pleased them, Vincent chose to arrange himself at the door. There, he intended to lend his assistance through the Project's course with an unobtrusive presence, delivering the meals brought up by a curious young kitchenhand from the local tavern, returning to his station to listen to the team talk uninhibited of the day's efforts.

It was Vincent's hope that he could at last complete a mission of which he could be proud.

Too long accustomed to his own necessary invisibility, Vincent had decided his presence on this Project must remain unnoticed by the scientists for his mission to be a success. This was contradictory to Vincent's role as outlined by his superior, for he was to report all aspects of the scientists' progress, and he could not perform from his customary distance. He struggled with the contradiction between his role on past operations and this one, and could find no clear guide as to his mode of conduct. A revelation came to him in the form of a thickly blown glass brimful of an Nibelheim scotch that very morning, a partial depressant against the pills which allowed him operation at night: the barmaid had delivered Vincent's request with such skill he had barely noticed, considering only her presence in the very absence of it. 

Vincent would be as a servant. He could offer nothing of value to the Project except in his assurance of the scientists' safety, and subsequently the Project's continuity. He was truly invested in such, having spent so much of his adult life compromising the safety of those who compromised Midgar's very safety. Imagine the scope of a Project whose deliverance would be life, and without the precursor of a governmentally necessary death.

Their first night in Nibelheim he had spent on the rooftops, in the first floor bedrooms of surrounding residences, and after a brisk hike, in the high pines surrounding the village itself; correspondingly, he had blacked out the windows of Lucrecia's ensuite, Hojo's bedroom, and HQ itself, while the team were breakfasting. The latter window was a shame, as the sunset through the dining room windows would have cast that room as a glowing alpine splendour; accustomed to windowless laboratories, the scientists did not comment on the relative gloom of their supper.

The prime comment, Vincent discovered with some surprise, came from Gast and was on himself, and the discomfort his arrangement at the door was causing.

'You're not our butler,' Gast declared at the last, 'you'll sit with us, Vincent, and eat with us.'

Ifalna, now so firmly placed in her supporting role that Vincent could not help but be suspicious of her diligence, supplemented gaily, 'Science has no servants!'

Left without logical recourse to deflect the invitation, and much in the habit of obedience even to a superior with respect yet wanting, Vincent sat. The free chair proved to be on Hojo's side of the table, and so Vincent discovered himself opposite Lucrecia. She looked at her plate as though counting her beans. 

In her youth, the grandeur of her family's history would surely have guaranteed her a butler. Vincent broke the tavern's fresh-baked bread in two. The crockery mismatched, his plate was too small and insufficient to its purpose, crisp crumbs showering the scarred tabletop on which it sat.

Supper was a silent affair. 

Within a few weeks of association, the conversation no longer remained oppressed. Hearing various complaints in a casual setting, such as Hojo's remark on the quality of test tubes -- 'such uniform cracking under heat, one might think they were deliberately designed with the flaw!' -- Vincent could correct the deficiency with a priorised delivery from Corel's geotechnical laboratory, or even appropriated technology from the school at Cosmo Canyon, and do it all without seeming direct instruction.

In such a way did he make himself indispensable. 

He set up an office, complete with large plastic phone and terminal, his umbilical to Midgar. The appellation of Administrative Research to the commonly known Turks was not the mockery it had originally seemed. The quantity of paperwork, organisation, funding necessary to maintain government was phenomenal, and Vincent had often considered himself glad to have a near-permanent field status, until the day he no longer had. Nevertheless, the tasks were not beyond him, and the three scientists all took for granted his capacity to type reports handwritten in fragments. This proved a strange assumption on their part, if not for his skills but rather for the knowledge: it was inconceivable to him that they should so blithely trust. He was a Turk.

Ifalna could do her own, she insisted, off-hand, in the direct manner she only affected when no other was around. 'There's hierarchy to this, you know.' 

Her results were subsequently recorded by the scientists, and forwarded to Vincent for collation. He felt no need for sporadic searches of her room or desk for journals and notes. 

Vincent reviewed in tranquility this passing of time without subterfuge or risk of death, and wondered if before he had only ever known the worst. Even Hojo's occasional reference to his secretarial capacity -- 'I suppose it's a step up from Shinra janitor, eh, Vincent?' -- failed to impact. Vincent found himself developing a fondness for their weaknessness, a pity which was ever his dominant human emotion, be it self-turned or externalised. Gast's insecurities, Hojo's leaping attentions, Lucrecia's absorption. It was Vincent who made possible Gast's weaknesses with his own strength, who screened Hojo's calls and cleared his desk of distractions, he who brought Lucrecia food and water, who pulled loosened, lank hair back into a tail away from her work, leading her to bed when all others had failed.

Vincent was not to be deprived his ration of sentiment, and as if the years of deprivation were now to be amended with glut, impulse led him to lead Lucrecia by the hand.

They paused outside her door. The grand clock in the unused games room, beside the safe containing all hardcopies of the scientists' findings, heralded the onset of the wrong side of dawn.

'Do you never sleep?' Lucrecia asked him. 'I've never seen you in bed before me.'

'If I did, then who would remind you to go to yours?'

'Such dedication,' she said, without inflection.

He let go of her hand. She clasped them before herself, meek hands. Eyes downcast, she formed an image of midnight supplication which he found very pleasing: it would have startled Vincent had he known the image of himslef in her mind's eye, the child-man she pictured him, the holding of hands an uneventful The slight smile was 

Vincent had assumed the conversation over dinner would be about the Project. His own make-shift family had, over their scarred staff-room plastic, always discussed work, Shinra, or Midgar; further back in his memory, all the conversations he had shared with his father over food had also centered around that man's singular focus. Vincent had no marker against which to measure if Ifalna's sulk of her aching feet (Vincent appropriated for her a a backless stool with wheels for use at her samples table) was a usual conversational tactic over supper, or whether the woman deliberately spoke of trivialities to deflect him from his purpose.

It did not occur to Vincent that the four scientists, in such close proximity to each other on a daily basis, would wish to talk of something other than their work. 

The conversation across the dinner table, if it did dance near Jenova's spectrum, shaded towards legends more than facts.

Vincent, having reached the age of discontent and beyond despising mythology, sometimes wondered if all his life would be led in a gloom-filled room, listening to nothing more than a wandering old man's speculation as to the origin of these creatures of legend, for it was invariably Gast that would spin those stories of winged angels and the critical event of 'salvation' from the sky. Lucrecia likely had tales of her own to offer, considering her scientific specialty, but for those first few weeks Vincent's presence seemed to command her silence in the same way her presence confounded all his intentions to charms. Ifalna oohed and ahhed at all the appropriate times, while Hojo prodded with questions that appeared to irritate Gast, who would have far preferred his tangents to Hojo's directness.

It was Ifalna who drew to Vincent's attention his lapse; she asked if his silence was disdain. Startled by her directness, Vincent apologized. He had rarely kept the company of women, his acquaintances with such fleeting, direct, and involving the exchange of funds; he could pretend according to social convention where his role required it, and had successfully spent himself in the kitchenhand's bed twice now to assure her his selfish intentions were nothing more than that. What Vincent lacked was a set of rules of conduct through which to interact with people continuously; he could not regard these four as family, howsoever often Gast would use the term, nor could he regard them as superiors when so many of their quirks and small obsessions earned only his disdain. (From Lucrecia's fits of temper to Hojo's too-easy distraction, they were so undisciplined!) They were clearly not his equals, no brothers-in-arms as were the Young Turks; nor were they strands of Vincent's information web - he could not assure Ifalna of his selfish intentions in the manner he had externally to the mansion. 

They were, Vincent realised, his subjects, his specimens: he studied them in precisely the way they studied Jenova. He used precisely the same set of skills he did when studying a mark, a target; but his intentions here were not to kill, only to _know_. He was a scientist. 

A mood descended. Perhaps the tendency to study from a distance was genetic; it seemed so many things were these days.

In atonement, Vincent played cards with Hojo at the inn until the early hours of the morning, mirroring the scientist's insults in a way that seemed to delight the man; he responded to Ifalna's flirtation sufficiently to earn her contempt; he turned his fear of Lucrecia into overt concern for her silences, which responded with an unexpected return of what was a very biting sense of humour; and he accepted Gast's continual invitations to lunch.

Over lunch, Gast divulged all his personal frustrations unto Vincent's attentive (and atoning) ears, until Vincent thought he could not bear it any longer. 

One word which Gast continually referenced, unnoticed, was salvation, until the very phrase rattled around all the vast spaces inside Vincent's skull.


	15. Memo on Unfinished Text

In the blurb for this story, I mentioned this was incomplete but also my first attempt at a structured novel.

Even now, eight years later, I open up yWriter and smile gleefully as I read through the framework. It was so ambitious; it was going to weave in Vincent's unspoken terror of his father's magnificence and fascination with monstrosities, willingly transforming himself into the potential end of the world at Lucrecia's hands because it was the only way to better his father's ghost; it was going to ground Lucrecia's neuroses in her innate fear of meeting her family's incredibly mundane expectations; Gast was going to be weak and weaker and his failed flawed insecurities and sexual-daddy-complex was going to be the only way Ifalna could get herself out of a bad situation, creating an interesting parallel with the Lu-Sephiroth pregnancy and the Ifalna-Aeris outcome. Hojo was going to be sane by comparison with all of them. 

And Ifalna, she was going to be amazing.

I have used the mini chapter descriptions as the chapter titles for the portions complete enough that I could post them. For what it is worth, here is the entirety of this story in skeletal form:

* * *

 _Who's Who, on the way to Nibelheim_  
01 Letter Addressing the Jenova Project Production Team's Conscription (Chapter 1 posted)  
02 Staring Contest (Chapter 2 posted)  
03 Get On Board (Chapter 3 posted)

 _The End (How It Began)_  
04 Funereal Guilt (Chapter 4 posted)  
05 Set the Scene (Chapter 5 posted)  
06 Fundamental Role Differences and Beliefs (Chapter 6 posted)  
07 The Convoy is Attacked (Chapter 7 posted)

 _Establishing the Team_  
08 Monstrous Massacre at Gongaga (Chapter 8 posted)  
09 Gast Begs Shinra for Funding (Chapter 9 posted)  
10 Gast Chooses his Scientists; Shinra chooses Gast's "bodyguard"

 _The Project Progresses_  
11 Swords Versus Guns; Shinra's Propaganda  
12 Arrival in Nibelheim  
13 Vincent Goes Through His Checklist

 _Vincent's Aside_  
14 Gast and Vincent Bond; Vincent Backs Off (50% posted as Chapter 14)  
15 Vincent Has a Flashback of his Refugee Life and his Father Summoning Leviathan  
16 Lucrecia Asks Vincent Why He Hurts Himself

 _The Wildcard Comes Out To Play_  
17 Hojo Does The Dodgy (Hojo POV)  
18 The Nightmares Start; Jenova Stirs (Ifalna POV)  
19 Vincent Crowns Jenova an Angel (Ifalna POV; otherwise known as why everyone near the Ancient is going batshit crazy)  
20 Hojo Gets Snowed Into A Cave With Vincent (Hojo POV)

 _Calamities_  
21 The Beast Breaks Free (Hojo POV; Jenova Mindfuck)  
22 Ifalna Does Vincent's Job (Ifalna POV)  
23 Shinra Comes to Nibelheim and Breaks Lucrecia More (Hojo POV)  
24 Lucrecia Ends It Before It Begins (With Vincent) (Lucrecia POV)  
25 Lucrecia's Past and Why She Should Stick to Fucking Scientists (Lucrecia POV)

 _The Beloved Triad_  
26 Ifalna Is Caught (Vincent POV)  
27 Vincent Snaps (Hojo POV)  
28 Vincent's Flashback; Guns, Power, Decisions, and What He Wanted Out Of Nibelheim (Vincent POV)  
29 Terrible Parents (And Lu's Unspoken Terror That She Is Now Meeting Their Every Expectation) (Lucrecia POV)  
30 Happy Found Families (Gast POV)  
31 Hojo Defends the Rights of Women Everywhere (Hojo POV)

 _Ifalna Tells What She Has Learned (A Look-Back)_  
32 Ifalna is Incarnate  
33 Ifalna is Disturbed  
34 Ifalna Learns

 _Calamities 2: Ifalna Burns Down Nibelheim_  
35 Ifalna's Realisation (Jenova is Not Her Mother)  
36 The Lab Is Burning Down (Hojo POV)  
37 Living Laboratory; Lucrecia Offers Herself (Hojo POV)

 _Intermission_  
38 Gast; Repentance; On Camera and All Alone

 _Hojo's Revelation; Shinra's Arrival Breaks Lucrecia_  
39 Hojo Understands The Truth (Hojo POV)  
40 Vincent Confronts Lucrecia without Resolution (Hojo POV)  
41 Shinra Arrives; Vincent Takes Charge of his Life...and Dies (Hojo POV)

 _Denouement; Lucrecia Fully Wigs Out_  
42 Lucrecia Tries To Piece Together the Shards (Vincent POV; Chaos/Omega/Jenova Threeway)

 _Endgame_  
43 Hojo Preserves Lucrecia's Endevours (Vincent POV)  
44 Ifalna is Pregnant (Gast POV)


End file.
